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Perfect Piano-Playing Hand Posture
Hand posture and comfort are vitally important while playing the piano or keyboard. Poor hand posture can cause your performance to suffer for two reasons: [more…]
Trembling Tremolos on the Piano
Although piano tremolos and trills sound much the same, there are differences between how they are notated and how they sound. A trill occurs when you flutter your fingers very quickly between two notes [more…]
Frédéric Chopin: Polish Piano Virtuoso
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was a thin, frail virtuoso pianist from Poland (see Figure 1). Chopin ("sho-PANH") single-handedly revolutionized the world of piano music. He changed everybody's idea of what [more…]
Finding the Right Spot for Your Piano
Whether you bought a piano or an electric keyboard, the first thing to do when you get your new baby home is to find a spot for it to live. This spot doesn't have to be a permanent resting place — pianos [more…]
How the Piano Changed Music
The concept of using dynamic markings (which indicate the relative loudness of different sections in the music) in sheet music came about around the same time as the piano — for good reason. Before the [more…]
How Musical Notes Are Constructed
You couldn't read or write music without notes. If you think of music as a language, the notes are like letters of the alphabet. If you know how to recognize the notes, you can learn the language. [more…]
How to Read Music Note Values
Reading music notes means understanding the value of each note (that is, how long each note lasts) and how notes fit together in sheet music. To know how to read music notes, you'll need to learn the different [more…]
How to Read the Rests in Music
Knowing when not to play notes during a song is as important as knowing the notes you do play. Understanding how to read rests will help you keep up with the beat and pacing of the music. Sometimes the [more…]
How to Tune a Guitar from the Piano
One of the most common ways to tune a guitar to a standard pitch is to use a piano. You need to know how to tune a guitar using a piano or some other fixed source if you want to play with other instruments [more…]
Common Musical Symbols and Terms for Playing the Piano
When you’re learning to play the piano, or any instrument for that matter, it can be hard to remember all those different musical terms and symbols — bass or treble clef, whole notes or half notes, confusing [more…]
Piano Keys and Their Corresponding Notes
The names of each piano key and each key’s location on the keyboard can be difficult to remember when getting started playing piano. Print this page (the notes are large enough to see easily from a distance [more…]
Piano For Dummies Cheat Sheet
Learning to play the piano takes a lot of practice. For that practice to be productive, though, you need to make sure your hands are in the right place to get the notes you want and that you correctly [more…]
Grand Pianos and Upright Pianos
Pianos are the most popular acoustic keyboards hands down (pun intended), with a 300-year track record, an incomparable tone, and a sound-producing mechanism that has been refined to respond to every subtle [more…]
Electric Pianos
For considerably less money than you shell out for an acoustic keyboard, also known as a piano, you can own a digital keyboard capable of sounding like just about any other instrument on the planet [more…]
How to Buy a Piano
Buying a piano can be as much fun as buying a car — generally without the pushy salesperson. You get to test drive different instruments to find the one that suits you best. [more…]
How to Identify the Keys on a Piano
The first thing you notice on your piano keyboard is the not-so-colorful use of 88 black and white keys. The black ones are raised and are set farther back than the white ones. Each key on the keyboard [more…]
Good Piano Posture
Depending on the type of keyboard you’re playing, you can either sit or stand while you play the piano. As a general rule, most pianists sit at the piano, but many rock keyboardists stand behind their [more…]
Fingering on a Piano
In piano lingo, fingering refers to using the best finger to play each note of a song, and correct fingering is always a very important part of piano playing. Even easy piano pieces have fingerings marked [more…]
Pros and Cons of Buying a Digital Keyboard
If you’ve decided that a full-on piano is not for you right now — or ever — you may be in the market for a digital keyboard instead. You can rent some digital keyboards, but not all. Some of the fancier [more…]
Types of Digital Keyboard
So, you’ve made the decision to buy a digital keyboard rather than a piano. Now you must decide what type of digital keyboard you want. Any digital keyboard is a versatile instrument, giving you access [more…]
The MIDI Places You Can Go with Your Digital Keyboard
An acoustic piano does one thing — produces piano notes as you press the keys. But, with a MIDI system attached to a digital or hybrid keyboard, you can connect to and communicate with other keyboards, [more…]
Parts of a Piano
Every acoustic piano, whether a glossy concert grand or a well-worn upright, part of an orchestra or a jazz combo, shares certain characteristics with every other piano: [more…]
Mnemonics for Piano Notes
Reading piano music is a learned skill, and to help you remember the names of the lines and spaces for each staff and the notes they represent, try a mnemonic [more…]
Crossing Your Fingers as You Play Piano
Piano music is often very fluid, requiring you to shift hand positions. The best way to do this is to use a little maneuver called finger crossing. Finger crossing is one of those techniques that can be [more…]
How to Buy a Piano
Buying a piano can be as much fun as buying a car — generally without the pushy salesperson. You get to test drive different instruments to find the one that suits you best. [more…]
