Piano & Keyboard All-in-One For Dummies book cover

Piano & Keyboard All-in-One For Dummies

Authors:
Holly Day ,
Jerry Kovarsky ,
Blake Neely ,
David Pearl ,
Michael Pilhofer
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Overview

The comprehensive go-to guide for building keyboard skills

Being able to play a tune on the piano can bring you a lifetime of sheer aesthetic pleasure—and put you in serious demand at parties! Whatever your motivation for tinkling the ivories, the latest edition of Piano & Keyboard All-In-One For Dummies gives you the essentials you need both to build your playing skills and expand your knowledge of music theory, from deciding what keyboard suits you best to musing on the science of what makes music so emotionally compelling.

This indispensable resource combines the best of Piano For Dummies, Keyboard For Dummies, Music Theory For Dummies, and Piano Exercises For Dummies and includes practice strategies, as well as access to streaming and downloadable audio to help guide your progress. In addition to becoming acquainted with the latest in music theory, you'll learn to develop your sight-reading skills and performance techniques—until you can reproduce pieces flawlessly on request!

  • Choose and care for your keyboard
  • Practice until perfect
  • Compose your own songs
  • Hook up to speakers, computers, and more

Learning to play the keys is a never-ending journey of new discoveries and joy, and there's no better companion on your voyage than this friendly, erudite, and comprehensive guide.

P.S. If you think this book seems familiar, you're probably right. The Dummies team updated the cover and design to give the book a fresh feel, but the content is the same as the previous release of Piano and Keyboard AIO For Dummies (9781118837429). The book you see here shouldn't be considered a new or updated product. But if you're in the mood to learn something new, check out some of our other books. We're always writing about new topics!

The comprehensive go-to guide for building keyboard skills

Being able to play a tune on the piano can bring you a lifetime of sheer aesthetic pleasure—and put you in serious demand at parties! Whatever your motivation for tinkling the ivories, the latest edition of Piano & Keyboard All-In-One For Dummies gives you the essentials you need both to build your playing skills and expand your knowledge of music theory, from deciding what keyboard suits you best to musing on the science of what makes music so emotionally compelling.

This indispensable resource combines the best of Piano For Dummies, Keyboard For Dummies, Music Theory For Dummies, and Piano Exercises For Dummies and includes practice strategies, as well as access to streaming and downloadable audio to help guide your progress. In addition to becoming acquainted with the latest in music theory, you'll learn to develop

your sight-reading skills and performance techniques—until you can reproduce pieces flawlessly on request!

  • Choose and care for your keyboard
  • Practice until perfect
  • Compose your own songs
  • Hook up to speakers, computers, and more

Learning to play the keys is a never-ending journey of new discoveries and joy, and there's no better companion on your voyage than this friendly, erudite, and comprehensive guide.

P.S. If you think this book seems familiar, you're probably right. The Dummies team updated the cover and design to give the book a fresh feel, but the content is the same as the previous release of Piano and Keyboard AIO For Dummies (9781118837429). The book you see here shouldn't be considered a new or updated product. But if you're in the mood to learn something new, check out some of our other books. We're always writing about new topics!

Piano and Keyboard All-In-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Playing piano and various keyboard instruments can become a lifelong passion, so be careful what you wish for. But it all starts with — and often, even for the masters, comes back to — the basics. This includes scales, posture, and determining which type of keyboard you'd like to play.

About The Authors

Holly Day and Michael Pilhofer are co-authors of all editions of Music Theory For Dummies and Music Composition For Dummies. Blake Neely was a contributing author to the 2nd edition of Piano For Dummies. David Pearl is author of Piano Exercises For Dummies. Jerry Kovarksy is a contributing writer to Electronic Musician magazine.

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Articles From The Book

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Piano Articles

How to Play Jazz on the Piano or Keyboard

If there’s one particular music style that embraces all that the piano can do, it’s jazz. Celebrated by many as America’s greatest art form, jazz is king when it comes to interesting chord harmonies, changing rhythms, and improvisation. Legendary jazz pianists like Bill Evans, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and many others have taken these elements and added them to classic songs to make them a little more jazzy.

The true spirit of jazz has always been improvisation, which makes identifying the actual construction of jazz most difficult. The goal in jazz is to create a new interpretation of an established piece (called a standard), or to build on an established piece of music by changing the melody, harmonies, or even the time signature. It’s almost like the point of jazz is to break away from form.

The closest way to define how jazz is constructed is to take the basic idea behind blues vocalizations — the call-and-response vocals — and replace the voices with the various instruments that make up the jazz sound: brass, bass, percussion (including piano), and wind instruments, along with the more recent inclusion, the electric guitar. In Dixieland jazz, for example, musicians take turns playing the lead melody on their instruments while the others improvise countermelodies, or contrasting secondary melodies, that follow along in the background.

The one predictable element of music in the jazz genre — excluding free jazz, where no real discernible rules exist but jazz instrumentation is used — is the rhythm. All jazz music, with the exception of free jazz, uses clear, regular meter and strongly pulsed rhythms that can be heard throughout the music.

Jazzing it up

All the legendary jazz pianists use tried-and-true musical tricks from time to time to freshen things up. Borrow these tricks yourself:

  • Chord substitutions

  • Swing rhythm

  • Syncopation

  • Knowledge of scales

  • Knowledge of chords

  • Nickname like Duke, Bird, or Cool Cat

It’s up to you

It’s time to be creative. Improvisation is perhaps the most important element of jazz music. It can be literal improvisation, where you (the performer) make up your own rhythms and riffs, or implied improvisation, where the music is originally written in a way that just sounds improvised. The easiest way to improvise is by changing the rhythm of a melody. For example, take the simple quarter-note melody of “Yankee Doodle” and transform it into a swingin’ jazz tune by adding swing eighth notes, syncopation, and a well-placed rest now and then to keep things cool. Listen to "Yankee Doodle" swings in Book IV, Chapter 2, Audio Track 94.

Substituting chords

Few jazz compositions use the standard major and minor chords throughout. In fact, few jazz pianists play the original chords written in a song. Instead, they break the rules and substitute new chords to liven up otherwise simple melodies. Check out this the well-known children’s song “Merrily We Roll Along.” As you play it, notice the simple chord progression of C-G7-C. Even “Merrily We Roll Along” can sound not-so-childish with the use of chord substitution. The idea is to find a more interesting chord progression from I to V7 to I. Try the following options:

  • Use major scale tones for chord roots. Move up the scale from C to G7, building triads on each successive scale note.

  • Use black and white keys for new chord roots. Move up in half-steps, building chords on each new root note.

  • Move up in fourths. Start a chord pattern in measure 2 by playing an Em7, then move up a fourth and build a seventh chord on each new root note.

Piano Articles

How to Use Auto Harmony and Chord Pads on the Keyboard

How can you expand your keyboard music with features already included? Modern arrangers have a number of other cool features that help your playing sound fuller and fancier without any extra work on your part.

Adding harmony to your melodies

Block chords is a style of playing right hand melodies where the melody is harmonized with additional notes below it to form full chord voicings, using smooth voice-leading. Organ players often use this technique, as did jazz pianist George Shearing, and it’s popular in jazz and dance big-band arranging within their sax section writing.

And you can too; it’s just a button-push away. Look on your front panel for a button labeled Ensemble (Korg), Harmony/Echo (Yamaha), or Melody Intelligence (Roland). Turn it on and then try the following:

  1. Set up your accompaniment to play.

  2. Start the accompaniment with a simple C major chord.

  3. Play a single note with your right hand; notice it’s playing a whole chord.

  4. Move around to some other notes while keeping the left hand chord the same and listen for how the sound changes.

  5. Hold a C note with your right hand and change your left hand chord to an F major.

    Notice how the melody (right hand) part changes; it’s now adding harmony using notes that match an F chord.

  6. Change your left hand chord to an A minor and hear the change.

Your keyboard may have different settings for the type of harmony it creates when using this feature. Read your owner’s manual and explore all the possibilities.

Hitting the chord pads

Some arrangers offer some buttons called pads or multi pads that you can use to tap out drum beats and trigger sound effects or even phrases of music. This setting is a fun way of adding more sounds and parts to your playing without having to worry about playing the right keys on the keyboard. These chord pads have various names and operate in a variety of ways:

  • Momentary/Hit: Touch the pad and a sound triggers once. This option is good for playing a single drum sound or synth sound effect (such as a zap).

  • Once: A musical phrase plays one time and then stops. You can use this method for something like a harp arpeggio or flamenco guitar strum flourish.

  • Looped: A musical phrase or sound keeps playing endlessly (in time with your accompaniment parts) until you turn it off. This function can add an additional percussion groove or a cool synth arpeggiated phrase (or even trigger the sound of endless audience applause).

Each style and rhythm has its own saved settings for the pads, so take some time and explore them.

Piano Articles

How to Play Your Keyboard with Accompaniment

The concept of using auto-accompaniment is simple: You play some notes on the lower range of your keyboard, and that tells the system to start playing some backing music in the key you gave it. You choose the style of music it plays from the choices presented on the front panel.

The result is the sound of a full band playing, giving you a professional backing track that you’re in complete control over.

How auto-accompaniment works

Playing with accompaniment usually means you have a split keyboard, with the lower range (left hand) dedicated to playing notes/chords to trigger the accompaniment and the right hand having a live sound to play your melodies with. Some arrangers and digital pianos have a full-play mode, where you play acoustic piano with two hands and the keyboard uses your two-handed playing to determine the chords.

Accompaniment uses styles or rhythms — collections of MIDI-based music tracks that play various instrument sounds to produce the sound of a backing band. They’ve been played and recorded by skilled musicians to faithfully reproduce various musical styles.

The unique thing about the accompaniment “engine” is that it can adapt these parts for any chord you give it, changing the notes within the pattern to fit the various root tones and chord qualities in music (major, minor, diminished, augmented, and so on). This adaptability is how auto-accompaniment differs from a prerecorded backing track, which rigidly plays back the exact notes you played to create the part.

Starting a pattern playing

Simple portable keyboards don’t always have full auto-accompaniment, so look for a button labeled Chords, Accompaniment On/Off, ACMP On/Off, Arranger Mode, and so on. These options indicate that you have full accompaniment parts, not just drums.

Here’s how to get a pattern playing:

  1. Press the Styles or Rhythm button.

  2. Make sure the Chord/Accomp button is on.

  3. Play a low C on the keyboard to start the pattern playing.

    If you feel comfortable, try playing a C triad (C-E-G) instead. If the music doesn’t start, press the Start/Stop or Play button while you play the note or chord.

    Accompaniment needs you to play a chord to tell the players what key and what chord type you want them to play (C major, F minor, and so on). So if you just press Start/Stop or Play, the drums will start without the rest of the band.

  4. With the music playing, select some other patterns and listen to how the music and parts change.

    For simple models, you can use the + and – buttons to move up or down to the next pattern or to scroll through the available patterns one at a time. Or use the numeric keypad (if available) to directly enter the number of a specific pattern you want.

On low-end models, the pattern names may appear on the front panel. On other models, the names are displayed on the screen. Higher-end models present the Styles/Rhythms on multiple buttons, with each button representing a category of styles arranged by musical genre.

Listen to various styles being played using a simple C triad in Book VI, Chapter 2, Audio Track 142.

Breaking down an accompaniment pattern

An accompaniment pattern usually has the following elements:

  • Drums: Drums include the traditional drum kit, with bass drum, snare, hi-hat, cymbals, and so on, playing a beat.

  • Percussion: This element includes things such as tambourine, cowbell, shakers, congas/timbales/bongos, triangle, and other hand percussion, providing extra color to the rhythm.

  • Bass: Bass presents the low notes that play some sort of rhythmic, moving series of notes. It may be an electric, acoustic (upright), or synth bass sound, depending on the style of music.

  • Chordal part(s):Chordal parts are often a keyboard sound and possibly some strummed guitar parts (acoustic or electric). Having a few tracks of this sort is common.

  • Other sustained parts: These options include string, vocal, and synth pad sounds — sustained chords for additional interest and sound variety.

  • Background melodic figures: These can be string lines, brass and woodwind melodies, synth patterns and arpeggiations, and guitar licks.

Every part will not always be playing; parts may come in and out depending on a number of settings and factors, such as which variation you’re using and the taste of the pattern programmer.

In Book VI, Chapter 2, Audio Track 143 is a style broken down into its separate elements or tracks.

Mixing the sound of the band

Mixing a musical recording involves adjusting the volume balance of each of the instruments, deciding which speaker they come out of (called panning), and possibly adjusting or changing the effects that are being used. Mid- and higher-priced arrangers give you access to these functions. Taking control of these aspects of your backing band allows you to make the sound exactly the way you want it.

How do you know whether your keyboard has this capability? Look for a feature/parameter called the Mixer.

Credit: Images courtesy of Korg Italy; Casio America, Inc; and Yamaha Corporation of America

A skilled musician/producer has already volume-balanced all the styles and rhythms in your keyboard, so you probably don’t need to make big changes. But two common scenarios require a little adjustment here and there:

  • Slightly increasing or decreasing the volume of a backing instrument: These fixes are small; you’re not trying to redo the whole band mix.

  • Turning off a part: This process is called muting a part or channel.

To change the volume of a part (it may be called a Part or a Track), you select it, use the interface controls to increase or decrease the volume parameter value, and then resave the style/rhythm.

To turn off a part entirely, you may have two options. If your mixer design has a dedicated Mute parameter, you can use that parameter to turn off the part. If it doesn’t have a Mute, simply turn the part volume all the way down to 00. Again, be sure to resave the Style/Rhythm.

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