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Articles & Books From Jerry Kovarsky
Cheat Sheet / Updated 08-18-2025
Playing keyboards takes you on a journey that goes far beyond just playing the music. You have to keep up on a lot of tech talk and sift through a wide variety of gear and manufacturers.Common keyboard terms and abbreviationsKeyboard manuals, web pages, and videos use all sorts of abbreviations and terms you may not be familiar with.
Discover the keyboard that's right for you, whatever your budget! Looking for a fun, challenging, and rewarding new instrument to play? Thinking about the piano but don't necessarily have the room or the budget to put one in your home? Then grab a copy of the second edition of Keyboard For Dummies! In the book, acclaimed music technologist and keyboardist Jerry Kovarsky explores the wide variety of keyboards available, their sounds and features, and how to find the one that's right for you.
Article / Updated 11-10-2022
Layering or blending two sounds together creates a wonderful, rich sound on the keyboard. Think of the sound of acoustic piano blended with some warm strings; it’s the perfect sound for playing a sensitive pop ballad. Combining a pipe organ with some vocal choir sounds gives you just the right blend for praise and worship music.
Article / Updated 08-08-2022
A metronome is a device that clicks in steady rhythm to help you practice your rhythm and time-keeping. Older versions were a vertical wooden case with a metal wand that swung back and forth. You had to wind them up to go. How quaint!
Nowadays, you can buy electric/electronic metronomes, or even metronome apps, that have lots of advanced features.
Article / Updated 08-05-2022
You can play a lot of music on the keyboard by using whole, half, and quarter notes. But the rhythm gets even more interesting when you have some notes that play faster than the main beat and when they occur in between the beats.
Divide the beat
To get the hang of playing in between full-beat notes, you need to be able to count the beat in a divided fashion.
The comprehensive go-to guide for building keyboard skills Being able to play a tune on the piano can bring you a lifetime of sheer aesthetic pleasure—and put you in serious demand at parties! Whatever your motivation for tinkling the ivories, the latest edition of Piano & Keyboard All-In-One For Dummies gives you the essentials you need both to build your playing skills and expand your knowledge of music theory, from deciding what keyboard suits you best to musing on the science of what makes music so emotionally compelling.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Playing a keyboard involves your whole body. Just wiggling your fingers about isn’t enough; you need to consider your sitting/standing position, your neck and shoulders, your arms and wrists, and even your legs and feet. Good position and posture helps you to play better and to avoid any pain that can arise from developing bad habits.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Reverb adds space around your notes and can make your sound seem farther away, even dreamy. It’s short for reverberation, which describes the continuation of sound in a particular space after the original sound is produced and stops or decays away. Reverb produces a kind of hazy or blurred type of echo that’s very pleasing to the ear and gives a sense of the space you’re playing in.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
An instrument with drums, like your keyboard, always has a beat ready to go; you don’t have to dig through a bunch of menu options or anything special to hear them. If what you get isn’t the groove you want to play, you can explore how various keyboards present their drum rhythms.
Portable keyboards
Simple portable keyboards don’t always have full auto-accompaniment, but they often offer drum grooves.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Stretching works well for medium moves in hand position, but often you need to move across more than five notes all occurring in a row on the keyboard. Here are a few techniques to choose from..
Crossing a finger over
When you’ve played from the pinkie to the thumb and need to continue, you have to bring a finger — the second, third, or fourth finger — over the thumb.
