PlayPianoFluently

A radical approach to learning piano & keyboard skills

Practice and learning materials to develop fluent musicianship with genuinely useful piano and keyboard skills such as improvisation, playing by ear and fluent sight-reading

Conventional piano methods are more performance-based, with a top-down approach. Piano technique, aural training, practising scales and arpeggios, studying music theory and practical musicianship… all these things can help you acquire skills for performing well on the keys. But they fail to generate real fluency in the language of music.

Whilst some people can perform well without fluency, msot of us need a clear and conscious understanding of the natural principles and elements of musical language – rhythm and tonality. Learning piano this way connects you to the core or essence of music.

We all learn music initially using our natural sense of rhythm and tonality and by copying songs and pieces. Conventional piano training takes this basic “karaoke” ability and enhances it through repetitive rehearsal practice to develop muscle. So, you will need to embrace the challenge of giving up this passive way of playing to clear the way for fluent expression using the musical vocabulary and syntax that you learn in PlayPianoFluently.

It is a radically different way of learning to play the piano, and people sometimes struggle to abandon old habits that come from the conventional ways we practise music in today’s culture. So an important part of the process is to explore and let go if psychological blockages. 

The willingness to play purely for self-expression is essential. Any desire to execute music, to reproduce it correctly, to achieve external results always gets in the way. Instead, for fluency to develop, you need to play with the principles and elements of musical language like a curious, pre-school child, and acquire the deep familiarity with this model of music that is necessary.

Express yourself, don’t impress yourself
or anyone else

That said, fluent musicianship training does build on your natural musical skill. You don’t need any musical superpowers like perfect pitch. You can simply discover how to map the piano keyboard into your brain as an embodied structure, to develop a powerful awareness of how rhythmic meter or musical groove works in a nonlinear way, and to internalise elements of rhythmic and tonal vocabulary – rhythm cells and tonal blocks.

All this is a very practical, embodied learning style that turns the piano keyboard into an extension of your body. You learn to move your arms, fingers and hands around the keys with natural, effortless ease, making the exact sounds that you intend to communicate.

This musical skill – genuine fluency – is extraordinarily empowering. You might be an experienced musician willing to take on a radical challenge, or a beginner who senses that music should function fluently like spoken and written language. Your level of experience doesn’t matter: you just need to have the a true beginner mindset, and an adventurous spirit.