You are neither too young nor too old to play piano and compose. If you think otherwise, get that fairy tale out of your head.

A few geniuses began at age 3 and burned out in middle age. Gustave Mahler, a modern symphonic artist and Jazz Guitarist legend Wes Montgomery didn’t start serious composing until they were well in their 30′s. Verdi was still going strong at 87. Some of the great pop, jazz, and rock music of our time has been written by musicians who consider the age of 25 as over the hill.

Conclusion: forget about age.

What about music theory? Does it have anything to do with playing the piano and composing a piece of music?

Sounds come first. Theory books and systems tag along behind, explaining in words what you’ve already experienced by ear.

Composing is a hot creative act. Studying theory is a cool analytical act.

Theory explains what is going on in a piece of music. It shows us the machinery that makes the music tick. Training in theory helps sharpen our understanding, and helps the player and composer organize his or her musical materials.

Absorb theory for what it has to offer. But watch out for the trap of rules. In the early stages of playing piano and writing music, rules can be helpful disciplines to help focus our thinking. But given too much importance, rules become handcuffs; break them if you know what you’re doing.

Use your good ears to break through the endless blanket of sound that surrounds our lives.

Direct you hearing. Sharpen your perception. Isolate sounds. Listen, and make yourself aware of your sound-world.

A painting, a statue, and a building have a certain kind of life. All of their parts exist at the same time. But music is like a movie or a stage play: it unrolls slowly, bit by bit. A movie begins, continues, and ends before your eyes. Music does the same for your ears. Your piano playing and compositions live and breathe.

Guidelines for Playing Piano By Ear to Write Music

Begin your sketches with a simple, basic idea: a sound you like, a group of pitches, an interesting harmony, and attractive rhythm pattern, an idea for lyrics, and so on.

Next step: think out a number of possibilities for developing, expanding, exploiting, and contrasting your basic idea.

For example:

1. A group of pitches can be played forward, backward, upsidedown, or with its order rearranged.

2. You can keep the overall shape of a pitch group (the way it moves up and down), but change it by opening up or tightening the distance (interval) from one note to the next.

3. The same pitch group can be varied by changing its speed, meter, or rhythm… or by changing its color through changes of instrumental register (high vs. low).

4. A rhythmic idea, no matter how simple, can be stretched, tightened up, fragmented, or transformed into a repeated figure

5. A rhythmic idea can be applied to differnet pitch groups, or used to give movement to your favorite chord progression.

6. A harmony can be intensified by adding color tones (7th, 9th, added 6th, suspended tones, etc.); or softened by subtracting chord tones; or given a refreshed sound by the way you voice the harmony on the piano.

Try to keep a relaxed attitude toward you study of piano, and an open mind about new ideas that almost always turn up while you’re experiementing with your sketches.

Above all, don’t lock yourself into one way of thinking. After a certain point, a piece may have its own ideas about the way it should deveop; don’t try to force it into a cookie mold!

Let it grow and breathe.

Copyright 2005 RAW Productions

Ron Worthy is a Music Educator, Songwriter and Performer. To learn more Trick of the Trade, go to: http://www.mrronsmusic.com and http://www.playpianotonight.com

Rarely is a chord played with its tones contained in a single octave, the root on the bottom, the third in the middle, and the fifth on the top.

Usually chords are voiced!

This basically means that the positions of a chord’s tones are scattered over the keyboard. The tones may be altered, doubled, added to, missing, and so forth.

There are a great variety of possibilities available in voicing chords. Voicing chords properly is an art within itself. Using the correct voicing techniques in your playing will give your improvisation a hip, mature and full sound. Chords played in root position just does not seem to do the job when playing Jazz, Rock, Pop, Blues, Gospel and Smooth Jazz piano.

Learning and mastering good voice leading techniques in your playing is not difficult if you just follow some simple rules.

1. The most important notes in any chord is the 3rd and the 7th. The 3rd of the chord defines whether the chord is a major or minor chord. The 7th of the chord will define whether the chord is a dominant or major chord. Usually the bass player will play the root and fifth. The root and fifth are not essential tones and can be completely left our from your chord progressions. If you must use the root and fifth try using it in your right hand, not your left. You should add your color tones in your right hand.

2. When you are taking a solo and not comping (accompanying) for another soloist you should play your chord voicings in your left hand, so that the right hand can be free to improvise, do fills, double the left hand, add extensions, etc.

3. The range of your voicings is also very important. A good rule of thumb to remember when voicing your chords, is to always try to voice your chords around middle C. Keeping your voicings around middle C will sound full and clear. Limits of approximately an octave above or below will assure best results by preventing the voicing from assuming a quality of thinness or muddiness.

Ron Worthy is a Music Educator, Songwriter and Performer. He offers online piano instruction for all ages at: http://www.mrronsmusic.com/playpiano.htm

Playing by ear is the ability to play a piece of music (or, eventually, learn an instrument) by simply listening to it repeatedly. The majority of self-taught musicians began their education this way; they picked up their instrument and began playing an easy melody from a well-known song, slowly picking out the notes as they went along. And even after these musicians master their instruments or a particular song, playing by ear still plays a large role. Many pop and rock bands don’t play or write their songs based on sheet music, they figure the songs out by playing by ear. It’s even common among non-musicians. Ever sit down a piano and mindlessly pick out the tune to Mary Had a Little Lamb? What about grabbing a guitar and suddenly finding yourself playing the opening licks to Smoke on the Water? That’s playing by ear. You’re able to play part of the song just because you’ve heard it so often.

Since music is basically composed of 3 elements melody, rhythm, and harmony, it is logical that there are also 3 basic steps to learning to play music by ear:

1. Charting the contour of the melody. Tunes move higher and lower up and down as the song progresses. Being aware of that movement is the first step. Once you mentally define the parameters of the melody, you can then begin to hone in on picking it out on your instrument. As an example, think of Joy To The World. Weve all sung it a zillion times, but have you ever noticed that the melody moves down exactly 8 steps (an octave), then gradually moves back up in increments, then repeats the down movement, etc. The entire melody is contained within those 8 notes, so you now know the parameters of the song and can begin to pick out the melody intelligently.

2. Harmonizing the melody with matching chords. The second element of music is harmony, and you can harmonize any melody just by matching the supporting chords to that melody. For example, if the melody is a G, you can harmonize that melody by using a chord with G in it, such as the G chord (G, B, D), the C chord (C, E, G), or the Em chord (E, G, B), or the Eb chord (Eb, G, Bb) and so forth. By using your ear to guide you, you can learn to harmonize the melody of most any song using matching chords.

3. Using an appropriate rhythm that matches the feel of the song. This is usually the easiest part, since most people feel the beat and dont have to do any mental gymnastics to come up with an appropriate rhythm for a song. But for those of us that might be rhythmically challenged, just by knowing that there are basically two meters available duple meter and triple meter — that can be combined in infinite combinations, we can give the song either a 3 feeling (like a waltz or a jazz waltz) or a 4 feeling (like swing or a march or a ballad).

Playing by ear is a valuable technique for many musicians; learning songs based solely on hearing them is a great way to understand song and chord structure. In fact, a great number of rock and pop musicians learned to play their instruments this way. Instead of picking up a book or taking lessons, they concentrated on figuring out the notes and rhythms to a song until it was mastered. Then they moved on to another song. And another. Gradually, they learned their instrument just by playing by ear — and in the process learned how to effectively structure a song in that particular genre. Playing by ear is also beneficial in helping a musician develop his or her own style; sure, they’ll at first mimic the style of the song they’re imitating, but the amalgamation of the music that they’re playing by ear will help them create something distinctive, something indicative of them only.

Duane Shinn is the author of over 500 music courses for adults. His book-CD-DVD course titled How To Play Piano By Ear Using Chords! has sold well over 30,000 copies around the world. He is the author of the popular free 101-week online e-mail newsletter titled Amazing Secrets Of Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions with over 61,200 current subscribers.

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