So Joe sent me an email this morning that I thought was worth sharing.
If you wonder what’s different about sheet music versus chords when it comes to learning piano, then you need to read what Joe has to say:
“Have you ever tried reading a book one letter at a time? Let’s even take it a step further, have you ever tried speaking one letter at a time?
Now of course the most obvious answer to that is: No! That’s silly.
Watching my kids growing up learning to talk, learning to read etc, or even adults when we learning a foreign language, do we start one letter at a time?Of course not!
When we learn a language, we start learning it with WORDS FIRST. We recognize what different words LOOK like and SOUND like. Once we start to do that and get comfortable with a few words, we start to string them together to form sentences. So while we are doing that we then pull apart those words we have learned to see what letters make up those words.
OK so what’s my point.
Learning Music is no different. Especially on piano.
The problem with traditional teaching is that music is taught one note at a time, instead of whole chords.
Let me describe it this way. In the language of music:
- The WORDS of music are CHORDS
- The SENTENCES of music are CHORD PROGRESSIONS
- The LETTERS of music are the NOTES.
If taught in the right order, you will learn much faster and retain that information.
In the same way letters in the alphabet can’t be held in isolation (by themselves), they need to resolve to something that sounds nice (WORDS), the same is with music, notes can’t be held in isolation, they need to resolve to something that sounds rich and full (CHORDS)”
I think that about sums it up.
You can start learning the piano exactly like this by signing up for PianoFool’s Layer Method Of Piano here:
Here to Serve,
Tim (PianoFool)
