Already play guitar? A lot of what you know carries over to piano.
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If you strum chords, you already know how songs are put together. Piano lays the same chords out in a straight line, which can make the theory easier to see.
- 1
You don't have to read music to start.
You learned to talk long before you learned to read. Piano can work the same way. Playing by ear first, and picking up notation as you go, means you start with real music, and the written notes have something to attach to later.
- 2
Your chord vocabulary transfers.
A G major chord is the same three notes on any instrument. Progressions you know by name on guitar work the same way on piano, so you're learning new hand shapes, not new music.
- 3
The keyboard shows the theory you've been playing.
On guitar, chord shapes hide the notes inside them. On piano you can see every note in the chord, which makes it easier to understand why progressions work and to write your own.
- 4
Variety keeps you practicing.
Practice drags when every lesson sounds the same. Moving through styles, from ballads to blues to jazz to classical, keeps it interesting, and each style teaches you something the others don't.
- 5
A clear next step beats a pile of random tutorials.
Free videos are everywhere, but they rarely build on each other. A course that tells you what to practice next, in order, takes the guesswork out of whether you're working on the right thing.
- 6
Where Pianoforall fits.
Pianoforall is an online piano course by Robin Hall, offered since 2006. It's a series of interactive ebooks with the video and audio lessons built right into the pages, and it works on PC, Mac, phones and tablets, even offline. It starts with rhythm-style chords, then moves through ballads, blues, jazz, ragtime and improvisation into classical pieces, teaching you to read music as you learn to play by ear. It comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee. You still have to put in the practice. It gives that practice an order to follow.
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