Now You Can Sound Like a Pro at the Piano... With a Few Simple
"Building Blocks"

Is making your piano or keyboard “sound good” challenging for you? Are you overwhelmed by all the notes, chords, theory, sheet music and online videos? Does something feel a bit “off” with your playing?

Have you taken lessons in the past, but still can’t seem to make your piano or keyboard sound the way you want it to?

Are you brand new to the piano? Thinking that there’s got to be an easy way to learn songs… without spending a bunch of time and money on traditional lessons?

Did you ever wish you could feel more comfortable at the piano? Or sit down and start playing songs almost effortlessly - even songs you hear for the first time?

I’ve had those very same thoughts and questions many times over the years, ever since I started playing piano around the age of 5.

It all began when I was 5 years old. My curiosity about our Wurlitzer spinet piano in the dining room got the best of me. I started playing around, asking my Mom - who knew how to play - for help finding notes and reading sheet music.

It wasn’t long before I was playing pretty well for a kid with no formal lessons.

I did take a handful of traditional piano lessons in grade school. But I got frustrated and bored, because I already knew how to play from sheet music. And my Mom and I had quite a collection!

Unfortunately, sheet music became my musical “ball and chain” for the next 15 years. I just didn't know how to learn songs by ear or play different styles off the top of my head.

Fast forward 15 years and I’m out of grad school with a new job in St. Louis. I've got some new music equipment, thanks to my aerospace job and bachelor lifestyle! LOL

Now I was on a quest to learn how to improvise and play jazz. I found a teacher and studied jazz piano for a couple of years, which was a huge turning point in my musical life. Now I could play rich-sounding chords and make my own arrangements. I bought “fake books” and immediately had thousands of tunes at my fingertips.

I did feel a lot more comfortable at the piano.

Lead sheets have served me well for many years, whether playing solo or group gigs, or for my own enjoyment.

And traditional sheet music is still fantastic. In fact, I rely heavily on sheet music at the church where I’ve been playing for almost 25 years.

I was about to enter a strange and life-changing new world...

At that point in my life, some crazy notion got me interested in the world of piano bars and “dueling pianos.”

That’s where two piano players face each other on stage, playing and singing every kind of music you can imagine. Oldies, classic rock, disco, rap, country and current top 40 hits. They take requests and play whatever songs they can (they know hundreds).

Sometimes they “cheat” a little and read lyrics and chords from a phone or tablet. But there are actually a couple hundred “core” songs that get requested at almost every gig. “Piano Man,” “Sweet Caroline,” or “Brown Eyed Girl,” to name a few.

I was fortunate to have two amazing musicians teach me this new way to play piano and entertain people. It's an understatement to say that Jason and Christian both made a huge impact on my future musical career.

But I’ll never forget the lesson Christian taught me one night.

I don’t remember exactly how he said it, but he told me to put more emphasis on my left hand.

That’s it.

It’s advice I still use to this day… 15 years later.

I’ve developed many piano courses over the years. And that simple advice made me realize this... you can make any piano music sound great with very simple techniques.

I call them “piano building blocks”... a handful of almost stupidly simple techniques that can get anyone up and running - or sounding better - on the piano in practically no time.

These building blocks can change the way you learn new songs and the way you feel about piano.

The real “secret” to learning songs on the piano is to break them down into basic elements and build up from there. Just make sure each element sounds good. That goes for melody lines, chords, left hand bass, where to play particular notes and chords on the piano, and so on.

Take a look at this chart created by Kenny Nin, a Spotify data analyst. It shows how often each key appears in all the music on Spotify. Notice that just 7 (30%) of all 24 keys (major and minor) appear in over 50% of all their music.

And here's another surprising fact... A tremendous number of popular songs use a progression containing just 4 chords. In Roman numeral notation, they are the I, IV, V and vi chords. In the key of C, that would be the C major, F major, G major and A minor chords.

So, you don’t need to learn every single chord or every key to play many of your favorite songs on the piano. You can get a lot of mileage from some very simple beginnings.