Instant Music at the Piano

Do you want to play the piano and make beautiful music, but you've never had a lesson and don't know where to start?  Here's a way to get your hands going on the keys to create thrilling sounds for your ears and heart. 

First, find yourself a piano.  Acoustic pianos are somewhat better for this exercise than digital pianos or keyboards, but anything with black and white keys will do.  Don't worry if the piano is in tune or not.  If it hasn't been tuned for a while, your music may come out with an Indonesian gamelan flavor, and you'll get a mini-vacation bonus out of your exercise. 

Take a comfortable, balanced seat in front of the keyboard.  Your arms should hang naturally from your shoulders, and you should have space to move your hands around the keyboard without feeling cramped.  You can test this by gently playing clusters of keys with your fists, letting the weight of your arm fall into the keys to make blocks of bell tones. 

Now for your instant music:  Put your right foot on the right pedal and just hold it down.  You've lifted the dampers off the strings so that they can vibrate freely.  If the sound gets too muddy at any time, just release the pedal and then depress it again.  Look at the keyboard--see those skinny black keys, arranged in groups of 2 and 3?  Aim your hands for those, either in gentle fists to play clusters, or with the 3 longest fingers on both hands to play individual keys. 

The black keys make up a pentatonic scale, the 5-tone scale that is the basis of much folk, sacred, and Asian music.  The cool thing about the pentatonic scale is that everything is guaranteed to sound good together.  Even the dissonances are like ice cream flavorings, not jagged or painful.   Without worrying about a beat, and still holding the pedal, play some black keys and listen to the way the sounds blend together.  I call this piece "Wind Chimes."  You can vary the wind, from a light breeze to a blustery spring gale.  There's your first instant piano piece.  If you play sounds that really grab you, repeat them until you can remember what you did.  Then you've gone from improvisation to composition.

To try other instant piano pieces, set yourself up by choosing a mood or image to portray (falling asleep in the sun, riding a bicycle downhill, a nightmare circus, hammering pegs to build a ship, cranking home-made ice-cream, cat chasing a piece of string).  To come up with instant black key sonification of your image, answer these questions with your hands on the keys:  How loud/soft should it be?  How fast/slow?  Big jumps between notes, or small flowing steps?  Rhythmic or free time?  Ascending/descending/wave-like motion? 

One other exercise:  think of a favorite song or instrumental piece, and hum it in your head for a few seconds.  Then, without knowing what the real notes are, play the rhythms and contours (up/downs) of your imagined piece on the black keys.  It won't sound the same at all, or will it? 

Have fun with your instant piano music, and write to me for more DIY piano lessons.