Beginner Piano Online
If you want to learn how to play the piano or keyboards then you will have most likely done an internet search on 'beginners piano' or 'how to play the piano'. The results will have no doubt been daunting as there are literally hundreds of online methods, tutors and courses readily available. In this article I plan to guide you through this maze and help you to decide which method is best for you.
The online teaching methods are generally home study methods based on the traditional one on one piano lessons. They all start at a low level giving you lessons which explain techniques and exercises to practice in your own time which help you perfect that particular technique. Once you start to become comfortable with that lesson you can move on to the next one and so on until you reach the more advanced lessons at the end of the course.
Online lessons come in various formats depending upon the course you decide on. The most common is the standard tutor in eBook format. This is just like a regular printed book but it is available for immediate download to your computer. The obvious advantage here is that you can purchase large volumes of information instantly online and most of the ebook courses come with a money back guarantee to fall back on in case you are not satisfied.
There are some beginner piano courses available which come as audio files. These have the lessons recorded on MP3 files which you can download and listen to on your computer or MP3 player. The lessons explain the techniques you should be using and let you listen to recorded examples of how they should be played.
The natural progression form audio files is of course video. This is becoming more and more popular each day. There are many online piano courses and methods now which deliver their content through this media. Here you can hear the examples and exercises and observe how they should be played.
You will find that most of the available learning material will come as a combination of some or all of the above methods. It seems that the best way to learn is to have an eBook with all of the course material laid out with diagrams and musical notations and to have the exercises on audio or video files as a guide so you can hear and see how it should really be done.
Before you decide on which method to go for you need to decide whether you need to learn to read music or if you want to learn to play by ear. There are some courses that will teach you how to read music quite quickly at the same time as teaching you how to play the piano. There are other courses that teach you how to play by simply listening and copying, this is great for improvisation and for playing songs that you hear without having to get the sheet music. There is even another method which teaches you how to read chord charts which is a combination of the above methods. Each has its own advantage and I will go into detail about this in a future article. For now you need to decide which path you should take and choose your piano course accordingly.
Here are our two recommended beginner piano methods and courses available:
Rocket Piano
Piano For All
You can find reviews on these two courses and much more on our beginner piano website.