This introductory article is by Will Barrow of Legacy Learning Systems. Welcome to my "Learn & Master Piano Secrets." First, my story. I was just a normal kid growing up in Forida when I decided I wanted to play piano. My mom signed me up for lessons and soon I was going once a week to sit and play scales with 'Miss Bernice.' I was too young to realize how much it was really costing my parents. At first, I loved it...it was fun being the center of attention for a couple weeks. But pretty soon I realized that this was NOT really music. It was scales. And it was SLOW. I would work on reading notes and doing my scales for hours every day, but it was just sooooo slow to give me any desired musical results. It wasn't long before I was putting LPs on the 'record player' and learning the songs I loved... through trial and error. I literally had to invent my own little "system" to get the songs off of the LPs and into my fingers to keep myself motivated while I kept learning to read music I'll tell you a little about that in a minute. Meanwhile, I kept going to my lessons (I'm glad I did, because that's where I learned how to read regular music off a page...hard as that was.) The drills were boring and difficult, but I stuck with it.
The trick, I found out, was to do enough "music" to keep me interested while I was learning to read! My most musical experience was learning by listening, at least at first. It was me, my LPs, and my piano. That's where I first discovered chords! Those are what first set me free to play what I heard and felt. (If you're a total beginner, chords are when you play several notes at the same time that sound good together.) I won a Grammy in 2005, I've played on Broadway, and I've literally travelled the world playing piano. But to this day, the most fulfilling thing for me is simply sitting and playing what's in my heart and head. So I mentioned my little "learning system." What was so important about that? It gave me 'speed of learning' by keeping me motivated. I was able to learn and play songs before I had the skills to read those songs. This kept me going when just doing scales might have shut down my motivation. While I was doing the hard work of learning how to read music (at my lessons), I could still come home and learn (very quickly) how to play and enjoy whole songs, because I was learning chords and how they worked! It's that system of learning chords, (along with a LOT more) that I teach in my Learn & Master Piano course. And I've taught literally thousands of people to play. They follow the system... they learn. This introductory article is by Will Barrow, Grammy Award winning keyboardist, singer-songwriter, composer, and educator.
You can check out Will's video here
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