PIANO & Keyboard Exercises for Beginners: Tips and Tricks to Play Popular Piano Songs, Read Music and Master the Techniques

Introduction

When you’re learning to play the piano or electric keyboard, knowing what the lines and spaces on a staff represent and how the notes on your instrument correspond to those on sheet music isn’t enough to become a proficient musician. Although you’re a beginner, you can improve your abilities in many ways. You don’t only need to know the correct keys to press and when to play them. A vast world of music theory and compositional variety greatly changes certain aspects of a song and ways to craft and play musical pieces to express yourself more freely.

Having the knowledge to reproduce what you read on sheet music is a wonderful skill, but music isn’t about rigidly following directions. Every composer and musician should develop their style and form. You can hand a piece of sheet music to a dozen talented piano players, and each will perform it uniquely. The song’s structure is the same, but there will be little techniques and flourishes that set them apart from the others. How music feels when you play is as important as hitting the right notes in the correct order.

Everybody has to start somewhere when learning a new instrument. Thanks to the simplicity of the piano’s layout, there is intuitiveness to each key moving from one note to the next. They span from A to G♯ (A♭) and reset back to A so the cycle of notes can repeat. With practice, you will locate the correct notes without looking at the keyboard. It helps with reading sheet music since you can focus on it instead of constantly looking down at the keys. Once you have a handle on reading sheet music, you can play songs tailored to novice musicians in no time.

To truly understand the intricacies of piano music, you need a foundation in basic music theory concepts and how musical notation is constructed. Some essentials include the staff, clefs, scales, chords, melodies, and harmonies. As you recognize the similarities and differences across a variety of musical genres, you can even pick and choose influences from each to incorporate into your repertoire. You learn to improvise and augment standard piano techniques to give your performances a personal signature unique to you.

Learning to play the piano better can be an incredibly rewarding experience, personally and creatively. Whether you’ve barely touched a keyboard or have logged a fair amount of time practicing the fundamentals, this book can guide you through improving your playing skills and reading sheet music like an expert. Along the way, you will pick up valuable techniques and strategies for honing your playing abilities, reinforcing good musical habits, and developing your instincts as a performer. You will be one step closer to becoming a master pianist by the end of this book.

Chapter 1

The Symbols of Sheet Music

Reading sheet music begins with recognizing and understanding the symbols’ meanings. The placement of notes, other notations, and symbols significantly change what and how you must play. A standard piano has 88 keys—52 white keys and 36 black keys—covering a range of pitches, including seven octaves, plus 3 additional notes beneath the bottom C. Unlike other instruments, such as guitars, violins, or cellos, the keys on a piano don’t repeat pitches. Since they have 88 keys, they have 88 unique pitches for musicians to play. This is why pianos have historically been used as the foundational instrument for famous composers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Learning to read sheet music for piano is an incredibly useful skill for musicians who focus on other instruments. The piano’s status as a foundational instrument in musical composition means it offers musicians the most comprehensive notational vocabulary. Once you know how to read sheet music for piano, you essentially know how to read it for any instrument in bands, orchestras, and other musical ensembles. Playing piano and understanding sheet music offers the basic skills for learning music theory. The way pianos and the sheet music is laid out makes the relationship between pitches and notes very easy to comprehend since ascending, and descending scales generally move in order from one key to the next. Chords and octaves on other instruments can seem unintuitive or abstract, but when played on a piano, they are constructed in an easily recognizable form.

Many different symbols are used on sheet music, which can overwhelm a beginner. However, some symbols and notations appear on most pieces of sheet music and are considered essential to learning. Other symbols are meant to inform the musician about certain techniques and variations to standard playing styles, but those can be added to your repertoire once you’ve mastered the basics. A strong foundation allows you to build your knowledge as you become more experienced in reading sheet music.

The Grand Staff

The grand staff is the most common musical notation for piano. It is the combination of the treble and bass clefs. The grand staff offers a quick and easy method to indicate which hands the musician should use to play certain notes. Anything placed within the treble clef must be played with your right hand, and anything within the bass clef with your left hand. When sitting at a piano, facing the keyboard, it is naturally easier for the right hand to reach the keys with higher notes, and the left hand is better placed to reach the keys with lower notes.

In the space between the treble and bass clefs on the grand staff are invisible lines on which notes are placed. These are called ledger lines. Notes written within the invisible space can be set on a ledger line or between them. Notes beyond the staff have a short ledger line that strikes through the middle of a note when it’s meant to be on the line. The note is attached to the bottom of a short ledger line when placed in between the lines. When only using a treble or bass clef, notes can be located on ledger lines below the top or bottom of the clef to indicate it should be played on a key well to the left or right on the keyboard. This is fine if only sporadic notes are this far from the clef. However, if significant notes are on these ledger lines, you’re better off using the grand staff with both clefs for easier reading.

Middle C is the exact middle point between the treble and bass clefs. The middle C is located at the center of a piano’s keyboard, so you can visualize the placement of your hands while reading sheet music. The farther above middle C a note is written, the farther to the right you’ll be playing with your right hand. The farther below middle C the note is placed, the farther to the left you’ll move your left hand. A middle C can be played with either hand, so choose the one that feels more comfortable. If one hand is playing notes closer to the center of the keyboard than the other, it will usually be the hand used for middle C.

Treble Clef

The treble clef is set in the top half of the grand staff but is often used on its own more frequently than the bass clef. Many instruments will use only the treble clef, usually because the instrument has a more limited range than a piano. Guitars, violins, flutes, oboes, saxophones, trumpets, and bagpipes are some instruments that only use a treble clef in their sheet music. The piano’s versatility is seen in its ability to use the grand staff or either clef on its own.

Due to the symbol’s design for the treble clef, it is known as the G clef. In modern musical notation, the treble clef symbol wraps around the line for G notes on the staff. However, it was first given the nickname because the treble clef’s symbol was originally depicted to resemble the letter G. Over the years, the design changed and became more ornate until its modern version was adopted as the definitive look for the treble clef symbol.

Musicians often use this symbol when sight reading to quickly identify where the G note is located. From there, they can easily determine where the other notes surrounding it are set. In musical pieces that only include the treble clef, the notes will generally not extend beyond middle C, as it becomes increasingly more difficult to discern lower notes within the invisible space beneath the staff. Not many compositions are written for instruments only using the treble clef, including notes beyond middle C, since music containing lower notes than it is better suited to the grand staff.

Bass Clef

The bass clef is used to play notes lower on the musical scale, usually below middle C. Lower-pitched instruments like tubas, bassoons, trombones, bass guitars, and double basses will only use the bass clef when reading or composing sheet music. On the piano, notes set along the bass clef are usually played with the left hand and consist of chords rather than melodies, harmonies, or riffs. While this isn’t always the case, especially with longer orchestral compositions, most modern