What's Easy. What's Hard.

I talked last time about learning to control difficulty in the playing of music. As musicians we have choices as to how we want to approach playing a song, and how difficult we want it to be.

As a teacher of pop piano, I find it interesting to realize I teach very conflicting concepts. First I show people how easy it is to play a song. Then I challenge them by making it more difficult. (If only I could make up my mind.)

But we should also acknowledge that individual songs themselves have an intrinsic level of difficulty to play. Many provide barriers to learning.

Generally speaking, the more chords a song has, and the faster the chords change, the more difficult the song is to learn to play.

Some argue that some songs have "difficult" chords, but that's not exactly true. I always maintain that all chords are easy to play on the piano. But if a chord is unfamiliar to you, then it's intrinsically going to be difficult, because you don't know it yet. And your hand doesn't know it yet.

Here's some examples of what I mean. Silent Night. Very easy. Just three chords and most pop piano players, even the beginners, know what those chords are.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is more difficult. It has maybe up to 18 different chords. Some of them (like the major sevenths) are challenging, because you may not know them yet.

Now consider The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire). Very difficult. Lots of different chords coming at you a mile a minute. And the song changes keys several times, adding more challenges. It's a real killer of a song to try to learn.

But one really cool thing is that as a piano player, you have some great opportunities to exert your control and influence. It's always possible to take an easy song and make it harder. And it's always possible to take a hard song and make it simpler. The former strategy is for beginners. The latter for experts.

When you make the transition from one strategy to the other, you have matriculated from beginner to expert.

Sometimes you find a song that you just cannot seem to be able to master no matter what. When you do, don't despair. Just give up (for the time being) and move along. There's no rule that says you have to be able to play everything. You can always come back to it later.

Coming Soon: (At Least) 22 Tips for Successful Learning of Piano

I tell my workshop students that I started to learn piano when I was 23 years old. It's true. That's how old I was when I decided I WANTED to learn about the piano and found someone who could teach it to me.

In actuality it started much earlier than that. My music lessons probably started the day I was born. That was the day I first heard music I'm pretty sure. Don't ask me exactly what was the first music I heard. I don't remember.

But there must have been some radio on somewhere in the nursery at St. Mary's Hospital. Or if not, I'm sure my mom must have started singing to me within hours if not minutes of my birth. The fact she was a professional stage singer had nothing to do with it. We naturally sing to our children. We can't help it.

So that was my first music lesson. Day One. And I've had a music lesson everyday since. I believe we get a music lesson every time we hear music played. Maybe it's just the subconscious mind that gets the lesson, but that counts.

By the age of four I learned to play records (78's I'm afraid they were) on the folks' Packard Bell phonograph. I still remember my favorite records. Tex Williams (Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette), Jimmy Durante, Spike Jones, Chico Marx, Oscar Levant (Malaguena).

Formal piano lessons started at six. They started again at seven. Then I started over again at seven-and-a-half. Then eight-and-a-half. By age 10, my piano career was over when I finally persuaded the parents that piano was not for me.

After all that time and with all those teachers I managed to conquer John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play, and got as far as page 19 of the John Thompson First Grade Book. Not exactly protege material.

Toward the end I was barely practicing 10 minutes a WEEK. Or maybe it was 10 minutes a MONTH. Piano was not what I wanted to do. So I was allowed to quit.

A funny thing happened after I stopped taking formal lessons. From then on you could not pry me away from the piano. I was playing around with it all the time. No direction, no lessons, no formalities, no practicing. Just play play play.

Later my attention turned to guitar and shortly after that to girls, but those basic years until about age 10 or so were very influential. And were very important to me.

What's the point of this?

By the time I was 33 I figured out how to present the one day piano workshop to adults, and since then I've taught the class to over 36,000 people (I think). It stands to reason that over that time, some people would come to regard me as an expert in the field of piano teaching.

Whether that's true or not is up for discussion.

But over that time, I've come to recognize certain key factors that contribute to ones development and success at the piano.

Earlier today I was staring out the window daydreaming when I decided to see how many of those key factors I could write down. Within three minutes I got to 22 of them.

So if you're interested, I'd like to share these factors with you over then next few issues. I'm sure that by the time I'm done I'll think of several more. These factors are often so subtle that we don't think about them. Yet they are very powerful. And often very simple.

Some of these key factors will surprise you. Maybe all of them will surprise you. And not a single one has to do with "practicing" as we know it. Stand by.