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
WHAT IS FLUENCY AND LITERACY IN THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC?
Music is the language of feeling. Using a simple working model of rhythmic and tonal vocabulary and syntax, we can tell a myriad stories about our inner experience. So feelings must be the driving force of fluent musical expression, and that can be difficult for some people. In contrast, the language of music itself is simple at its core: a few basic nuts and bolts that we learn by practising “saying” them with clear moment-by-moment awareness, until they become deeply familiar. Once fully internalised or embodied after lots of relaxed, playful, expressive practice, we can “say” these components effortlessly. That’s because, unlike conventional music theory, the data is not too dense to be processed in real-time, and so it requires no thinking or working out.
So here’s an outline of the model:
A vocabulary of 12 rhythm cells that can combine in all kinds of ways flowing within the syntax of a stable but flexible rhythmic matrix structure (groove) built from simple rules;
A vocabulary of 12 major and 12 minor harmonic blocks, 2 whole-tone blocks and 3 diminished blocks that plug into 12 pentatonic and 12 diatonic blocks to form a tonal map – the keyboard map.
Express yourself, don’t impress yourself or anyone else
A BREAK WITH CURRENT CONVENTIONS
In today’s culture, music is not often thought of or experienced as a language that we can all “speak”, but rather as something external – a performance, a recording, a skill, an object – musical results that we try to achieve or emulate. But these material outcomes cannot be the goal in fluent music making! This is very important and often requires a massive and challenging paradigm shift. Whilst external results do of course appear easily and naturally as by-products of musical fluency, they must never be the motivation of your training or your fluency will be blocked! Our motivation must always be to express ourselves intelligible using the elements of musical language.
There are plenty of ways to get impressive musical results without needing to be fluent in the language of music: this is the focus of current conventional musical education, which uses the following methods:
AUDIATION & EXECUTION – imagining music and mimetically generating it by design, intuition or trial and error based on our sense of “how-it-goes” or “what music sounds like” (karaoke!)
MUSCLE MEMORY – playing pieces after repetitious rehearsal, or “improvising” with scales, arpeggios, exercises, riffs etc. drilled into us often with a metronomic click to train time-keeping
THEORY – analysing or encoding music based on theoretical data such as lists of notes carrying pitch and duration values, intervals, keys, chords, time-signatures etc. (this includes conventional ear-training and practical musicianship approaches)
TECHNIQUE & SHOW-AND-PLAY – making music as an act of mechanical or physical execution that is practised using top-down understanding
YOUR INNER MUSICIAN ALREADY WORKS NATURALLY
There are rare individuals with intuitive musical fluency. Don’t believe today’s cultural misconception that musical fluency is only possible for those people with their special superpowers (e.g. perfect pitch)! Our natural inner musician (sense of rhythm and tonal relationship) developed when we were small children and is already very powerful and effective passively. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t intuitively understand music, enjoy it, feel its message, and recognise a good or bad performance. And you can! We just need to train the mind and body to grasp recognisable musical structures and patterns actively, consciously and clearly in real time.
REAL SKILLS
Being fluent and literate in musical language generates many amazing skills that conventional methods fail to train successfully from scratch. These skills are:
- instant real improvisation – the ability to “speak” music spontaneously, like conversation
- playing by ear – the ability to understand and therefore play anything you can remember
- fluent sightreading – the ability to internally hear an unfamiliar score instantly and therefore play it
Musical memory, the ability to learn new pieces very quickly, technical virtuosity and many other skills which are less directly connected to fluency are also boosted significantly.
RHYTHM COMES FIRST – IT MAKES GOOD TECHNIQUE EASY & TONAL SENSE POSSIBLE
When the keyboard is mapped internally, we experience it as an ergonomic tool – almost a prosthetic extension of the body. All the keys are laid out in a wonderful symmetric structure that we have fully internalised, and we can expect our finger movements to be relaxed and stable as they go directly and effortlessly to all the places where the tonal sounds live. But fluent rhythm skill precedes tonal skill, for 2 reasons:
1. MOVEMENT
When our movements are rhythmic, powered by the inner flow of the groove, they have natural grace and ease. Then we don’t need to think about technique as if our bodies were machines. And the movements of the fingers are as natural as the complex movements of the tongue, lips and internal manipulations of the internal space of the mouth as we speak. It is rhythm that powers these coordinated, efficient movements, and modified speech (chanting) is the best tool for training that rhythm into the fingers. Neglect it at your peril!
2. STORYTELLING
Tonality is really an enhancement of rhythmic structure. Tonal rise and fall, tension and resolution or cadence is something that only has meaning within the poetic, storytelling structure of groove. The groove or rhythmic matrix is what makes musical sense first and foremost. Without it, tonality might sound pretty, like windchimes, but it is meaningless without the essential syntax of rhythmic structure. Training yourself to know where you are within the rhythmic structure moment by moment is necessary to make tonal relationships register properly.
IS IT FOR ME?
This counter-cultural approach to music training is not suitable for everyone! You need a pre-school attitude, as used when learning your shapes and colours. Some people, will find its simple common sense to be a refreshing relief from the pressure of learning music in the conventional passive ways, whereas other people may struggle with letting go of old models or with expressing themselves freely from the body and soul. It’s necessary to let go in order to find the right focus.
I take the view that learning is really always self-directed. People learn at different speeds, have different aptitudes and blockages. A one-size-fits-all course can’t address this. Hence, this is not a typical course. But the materials are carefully designed to help to keep your practice on the rails, as long as you actually apply the guidance.
Because understanding only comes from experience gained through practice (this is practical knowledge not theoretical), it requires that students let go of any need to have a priori understanding, remove all preconception and take on a beginner mindset. Also, your fluency training must be kept very separate from any passive music you do: it must be an area of pure play and experimentation with a powerful psychological forcefield around it.
If you’re ready to make the jump, to apply yourself in the ways explained here, using the materials with discipline, patience and curiosity, playing only within the limitations of your current (but ever-expanding) musical “vocabulary”, using musical patterns and pure improvisation rather than familiar music, to discover the art of pure moment-by-moment focus with bold letting go, then this approach offers genuine musical empowerment.
To see if you have the right mindset, you can even
You don’t need to be discouraged if you fail initially, but rather let it encourage you to ask yourself the right questions to find the ideal mindset.
Visit my PlayPianoFluently playlist on YouTube to gain further insights and don’t forget to subscribe to be notified when new videos are posted!
