Hi, Piano Buddies,
Today we’d like to cover an issue which is, in our humble opinion, the holy grail of piano playing for beginners: How to play successfully with both hands, together!
If you’ve just started our PENTA Primer course, this seems to be miles ahead. You may be still struggling with practicing the keys with your right hand, or have started learning chords with your left hand. Playing with both hands seems almost impossible at this point.
So don’t let your heart be troubled. Help is on the way!
Our course takes a very unique approach for teaching you how to perform this marvel. We have managed to break down complicated songs into basic building blocks, called duration methods. You can compare it to breaking a molecule into its basic atoms. As any chemistry student knows, both sugar and starch are made out of only 3 kinds of atoms: Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen (and that is why they are called Carbohydrates). It’s the quantity, combinations, and order that makes two totally different materials. Same with music in PENTA – we narrowed down the list of components to a dozen or so (for a beginner) and if you learn and practice them well (they are rather easy), you will be able to play many songs after that, by sight-reading only (playing without memorization – just by looking at the page in front of you)!
We know it sounds too good (and simple) to be true, but it's really working. You will still need a few weeks of practice to learn it well, but in comparison to months and years that it takes with standard methods, it is really a boon.
Just as an illustration, In PENTA, most chords are played with your left hand, as a sequence of 3 keys. The C chord, for example, is played with C, G, and C+. So, if you think how the melody keys overlap this chord, there are not that many possible combinations.
You can play, for example, 3 melody keys together with the chord, like this:
(the symbol following the C chord, called duration, shows where to play the chord’s second and third key). Or maybe only two melody keys like this:
Or possibly the melody keys will start before the chord and finish in the middle, like this:
Got the idea? There is a finite, not large, number of possible methods. And if you stick with the course till section 4, you will learn them all and be able to play all kinds of music. Sounds terrific, doesn’t it?
We’d like to end this weekly email by a self-written testimonial by our bright student from Melbourne, Australia, Effie Mineo, about her experience of learning to play from scratch with PENTA and how it really changed her life:
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I’ve ‘touch-typed’ on a typewriter's keyboard with good speeds since I was a girl, and thus I reasoned, ‘How hard can playing piano with both hands really be?’
When you don’t know, you just don’t know...
Well, let me tell you, it’s hard; it’s very hard - at least at first.....
However, thanks to
✅ the excellent content, drills, and exercises of the PENTA Primer course;
✅ the fact that my failing eyes didn’t have to follow the inscrutable progress of dots with tails sprinkled over a double set of 5 lines (as found in traditional sheet music);
✅ by heeding the advice found at the end of every set of exercises, ‘Be sure to practice them and feel fluent before moving forward!’
I was playing with both hands within the same month of the beginning, from a starting point of zero-knowledge!
My self-conscious, awkwardness, and fumbling quickly gave way to hours of sheer pleasure at our digital piano. Today, a mere 4 months later, there’s no power on earth which can distract me from my daily practice time. Indeed, save for the birth of our first grandchild, playing the piano with the Piano Esperanto method, has been the highlight of 2019 because it has gifted to me an enduring ability which can only grow and get better from here and enrich the rest of my life!
And, wonder of wonders, did I mention that it’s all absolutely FREE?
Thank you, Piano Esperanto; you’ve added a priceless dimension to my experience of life!
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We thank Effie for her candid and lively description and will be happy to publish other students’ experiences as well in our future weekly mails!
Have a wonderful week, and may you find time and relaxation to play the piano a lot!
The team at Piano Esperanto
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