Time is an asset

Learning piano depends a great deal on the amount of time you are willing to invest in practice. In most cases to learn piano is a lifelong pursuit and it never really ends. There are several avenues you can explore and you may spend your lifetime exploring things for hours each day. Although it does not take too much time to learn the basics of playing the piano. You may learn the fundamentals such as basic finger patterns, chords, and scales and become capable of playing some songs that you may enjoy. You can learn to play by the ear by developing it and learn to play the instrument without having to read the music.

What do you need to practice?

Keep in mind that you will be able to achieve the required dexterity for the hands and fingers only when you are practicing regularly and consistently. Have a specific time reserved every day for your piano practice to improve your skills rapidly. The greater your skill level, the greater will be your capability to learn and play the instrument. You will also be able to access more material in such cases. The more the number of hours you spend practicing piano better will be the sound you are making. This knowledge will push you further to work harder.

Memorize all notes

To learn piano and any music you need to approach it similar to learning a language. There is always a new alphabet to learn apart from learning the finger placements on the piano keyboard that will correspond to the newer letters. You need to spend time learning about these letters and the corresponding keys of the piano as a first step towards learning piano. If you are not aware of sounds, how can you learn the instrument? You will quickly find out that many patterns repeat over the keyboard. After you have learned it, you would have unlocked the mystery of the instrument.

Using a program or an app

One of the fastest ways of learning piano is by following a structured program that guides the progress. It will not take up a lot of time just around 10 to 20 minutes every day. However, a structured program you can follow is designed by music professionals and teachers and it allows you to achieve all the benefits associated with music learning. There are many apps available on the internet that are designed to give you a step-by-step program for developing your piano skills fast and simply. By using a well-designed app to learn piano you will find out that the whole process of learning piano doesn’t take all that long.

Learning basic finger patterns and chords

Your piano is full of different patterns such as a computer or a matrix. You may learn piano quickly by learning these fundamental finger patterns. There are some fundamental finger patterns while playing the piano that repeats in several different ways. Similar to this, there are also some chord patterns and progressions that give you almost hundreds of songs that may include some that are your favorites. A chord is just a blend of two or more notes played together.

The reality is that to learn piano you need just two things, having the machine available all the time and devotion to the practice. Find a piano that is suitable for you and get familiar with the new machine. You can learn the instrument via several tutorials and videos available online. You need to begin practicing each day to accelerate the learning process. Set goals such as playing in front of an audience within a couple of weeks. If you live in Tampa Bay, FL area, you can get the new piano from Dave’s Piano Showroom that is a professional place for everything related to the instrument.

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Importance of Learning Piano For A Child’s Overall Development
Processing sound accurately requires three important skills i.e. reading, communication, and language. Children receiving music instructions such as piano lessons are expected to develop these three fundamental skills at a much faster rate. There is a strong relationship between music and language. With more music lessons, children tend to improve their ability to be verbally competent. Hence, with better development of language skills, they are equipped better to process sounds.

Several studies have also shown that music education can improve spatial-temporal skills in children. These skills are useful to solve problems involving multiple steps. Children learning music are better equipped to visualize different elements that should go together. It allows them to solve puzzles much faster and with less effort.

How To Prepare Your Kids To Take Piano Lessons?
For parents looking to enhance the development of their children through piano lessons, the best way to prepare them is to create a music-filled environment. Piano for kids requires dedication and some love for music to inspire them and make their own. The following ideas can help you to encourage your children to learn and appreciate music.

Listen To Music With Your Child
Select from a variety of music choices ranging from classic composers to the popular tunes by the Beatles. Listening to music together can help in introducing various melodies and harmonies to your children. They will be able to discover the sounds they like and prepare to learn about the various musical concepts.

Indulge in Music-Related Activities
You can indulge in a variety of fun activities with your children and help in developing a lifelong appreciation for music. You may sing nursery rhymes or organize a family sing-off to observe who comes up with the silliest ditty. Making your musical instruments such as a shaker made of plastic eff or a set of drums made using plastic containers are some great activities.

Attend Live Music Concerts
Watching a live musical performance inspires you to play the instrument yourself. If you take your children to watch such performances, they will start visualizing themselves playing the musical instruments.

Play With the Piano
Learning piano for kids requires them to familiarize themselves with the piano itself. If they see it every day and hear it played daily, they will surely be encouraged to play it themselves.

How to Make Sessions of Piano for Kids More Interesting?
Irrespective of the place where your child learns piano, you need to make those sessions easier and interesting. Here are some ways that can make their learning more interesting.

Metronome
Available for free, a metronome is a free online tool that is beneficial to everyone learning to play the piano. The tool displays a steady pulse or beat that helps your kid keep time while playing. You have the option to speed up or slow down the tempo. This tool is ideal if you are starting to learn a song and helps to improve your sense of rhythm.

Use Piano Apps for Supplement Lessons
The tech-driven environment around us features apps that can motivate kids to practice their lessons and even advance to the next. Piano learning apps let your child practice whenever they have time or feel motivated to play.

Integrate Games In Practice Sessions
If you can make practice sessions feel more like playtime than a repetitive or serious activity, kids would love to practice piano daily.

Lastly, it’s important to motivate your kids to stay focused as they would do in any other activity. Lack of motivation can easily make them lose interest or get distracted especially if they feel they aren’t making any progress. Motivate them and encourage them to practice and learn to play the piano despite failing to achieve what they would like to after each session. Ups and downs are a part of any musical journey, but constant efforts and dedication can help your child to become a master.

If you are looking to purchase a new or a used piano in Tampa, FL, visit Dave’s Piano Showroom. They present several pianos for sale and on rent. You may also book their services for piano restoration and servicing.

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Children are all different. So this makes it hard to say if there is a perfect age to play piano when beginning. Some children learn to play as soon as they are three because they have an older sibling in the house that plays. Others will not start until they are twelve or thirteen because they become interested in music. Many children will start at the age of five or six.

Now, let’s talk about that three-year-old again. Can a three-year-old really be expected to play piano? If a three-year-old has an interest to play piano, there is nothing wrong with letting them explore the piano. But this should be done in the manner that they want to do it, without any set schedule. Should they be forced to play? Probably not. That may cause them to hate everything about the piano when they become older. And a child this age does not have a very long attention span, so paying towards coaching will most likely be pointless. The music teacher will spend a great deal of his or her time averting the youngster instead of teaching anything.

If you like the idea of your child being involved with music, and your youngster is too young to perform on the musical instrument, spend this time with them musically involved. Sing and dance with them. Listen to a variety of music. Send your kid to a music curriculum, such as Kindermusik. By building musical concepts, you can build a great, solid framework for your child’s love of music.

There are some requirements that should be met in order to see if a youngster is set to play piano. These include the following:

• Is the child able to arrange their fingers on five white keys that are adjacent to each other? This may not be possible for every five-year-old. A child’s hand must be big enough to be able to do this, or they will not be ready enough to play this musical instrument.
• Does the young person possess finger independence? Can they keep up all the fingers and move only the finger you ask them to?
• Does the young one have a passion to discover new things? Are they interested in songs? If you make your child take piano lesson, they will struggle with learning or try to rebel against it. If your child does act interested, and you do start lessons, but then they lose interest, you can take a rest for a while and then try starting back up again.

The best age that most parents have found to start piano lessons is around age six. This makes sense as this is the age when children are going to kindergarten and have adult direction at school. Their hands are flexible enough to move around on the keyboard too.

Once your child has started to play piano, you should consider purchasing a piano for your home to practice on. Consider purchasing from a trusted piano shop, such as Dave’s Piano Showroom.

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How Studies Show Musicians Stand out From Non-Musicians

There are many positive ways in which musicians are said to be better than non-musicians with better language skill abilities being the primary advantage they have going for them. This is something that scientific studies have backed up, even though they’re uncertain why this is true.

One study that was conducted by Yun Nan et al. was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It looked at 74 Chinese kindergartners who took piano lessons for six months. This study suggests that these lessons can heighten the brain’s response to changes in pitch. These same lessons were also shown to help these children be better able to tell the difference between two similar-sounding Mandarin words that contained different consonants. This was in comparison to students who got extra reading training, or who went through regular kindergarten, but didn’t take any music lessons. Researchers believe that the reason for this is that the training enhances the neural processing of pitch and improves speech perception – specifically in Mandarin-speaking children, but it’s believed that this happens with children who speak other languages, including English, as well.

The reason why researchers paid special attention to the Mandarin language is because it’s a tonal language. One famous example of this is the word “ma,” which can mean mother or horse depending on its pitch. While it’s possible that this has influenced this study’s results, Robert Desimone, a neuroscientist at the McGovern Institute at MIT says there are other studies available to back up the benefit of music lessons in learning language – even in countries without tonal languages, like those that speak English. This is because there’s the belief that there’s also a neural basis for these benefits.

How Your Children Can Benefit

Even if you don’t own a piano, you can still read to your children and they’ll reap a lot of great benefits from you doing this for them. In fact, the study showed these children did just as well on many of the same measures as the children who were in the piano group. The important thing here is to expose children to as many of these different activities as possible. If you can get your child piano lessons, you should definitely do so though. You can get your child a great piano from Dave’s Piano Showroom so they can start taking piano lessons and improving their language skills soon. As a parent, you’ll definitely notice an improvement that you can be proud of.

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Controlling the Environment for Your Baby Grand Piano

Your home’s temperature, or at least the room in which you plan to house your baby grand, will have a profound effect on the delicate components that this instrument is composed of. This is especially true of high humidity, which will warp the instrument’s soundboard leading its tuning pins and piano strings to rust. You also don’t want to house the instrument in an atmosphere that’s too dry since this can cause the beautiful wood on your baby grand piano to crack. It can also cause its glued joints to start separating. Instead, you’ll want to make sure that the humidity near your instrument is as stable as possible. You can use dehumidifiers or humidifiers and a hygrometer to do this.

Where not to House Your Baby Grand Piano

When you’re wondering where the best place is for your new instrument, simply think about the places where you shouldn’t keep it. These include:

• In direct sunlight
• Where air will blow directly on it
• Next to an unsealed outside walls
• Near a working radiator or fireplace
• Away from cooling and heating vents
• Rooms that aren’t climate controlled

Unfortunately, this does rule out places like sun rooms, enclosed porches, basements, attics, and garages because they suffer from poorly insulated walls or are otherwise unfinished.

Keeping Acoustics in Mind When Decorating the Room

There are a few different factors that will cause variations in the sound your piano emanates when you play it. However, the biggest fac tors are whether it’s in tune and whether the room’s acoustics reflect or absorb the sound.

When your piano is in a small rooms it will sound best if there’s a 1.1-second reverberation time. This means that it takes this long for sound to reflect from the room’s walls, ceilings and floors. The best way to achieve this is by placing your piano in an area that has both hard surfaces (e.g. concrete, hardwood, glass windows, wood paneling) that can reflect sound and soft surfaces (e.g. upholstered furniture, rugs, carpeting, heavy drapes, tapestries) that can absorb sound.

Making Room for Your new Instrument

A baby grand piano takes more care and room than you might think. Make sure you’re prepared. You’ll need at least 5 feet of space from the front of the keyboard to its back. You’ll also need room for its bench, allowing someone to easily maneuver on and off it. You also don’t want your piano any closer than 6 inches to an exterior wall nor do you want a room with a cathedral or vaulted ceiling that extend more than 12 feet high because the sound will disperse. When you’re ready to give a baby grand a home, stop by Dave’s Piano Showroom and we’ll help you find one that’s perfect for your home.

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There are many facets involved in these lessons including memorization, expressing emotion, and learning about musical intervals and chords. The experience’s multidimensional is obviously motivating children’s IQ today. This really shouldn’t come as any surprise though since a decade ago, the University of Wisconsin’s Frances Rauscher led researchers in finding that simply listening to Mozart triggered temporary increases in spatial intelligence. Unfortunately, this was difficult to replicate in subsequent studies, but it allowed the idea that music and piano training can raise IQ to take hold in the scientific community.

What Recent Studies Demonstrate

In the most recent study into this matter, 12 6-year-old students in Toronto were given weekly voice or piano lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Music. This age group was selected because their developing brains can still retain a lot of “plasticity” (the brain’s ability to change and adapt to environmental stimuli). Researchers felt that children under the age of 6 weren’t suitable because they couldn’t engage in rigorous lessons. Additionally, anyone under the age of 4 can’t start serious musical training. Another group of students were given free, weekly drama classes to separate the effect on IQ of training in the arts in general. There was also a group who received no classes at all.
Each student’s IQ was tested beforehand with the full Weschler intelligence test. This assesses various aspects of intellectual functioning in 10 different areas. After the three-hour initial assessment, the children attended first grade and then they were retested between first and second grade. While all the students displayed an increase in IQ of about 4.3 points, this was because they attended school. However, additional changes were noticed, including:
Children who took the drama class and those who took no classes at all didn’t have any increase in their IQ. However, children in the drama class did score higher regarding sociability probably because of the cooperative nature required in these classes.

Children who took voice or piano lessons had a slightly larger increase in their IQ – about 2.7 points higher. This small but significant increase was evident across the Weschler test’s broad spectrum.

What This all Means

This new study backs up other studies that were conducted in the past. While this work focuses on special intelligence (the ability to think through 3D puzzles without resorting to an actual model), it’s speculated that understanding music, especially learning how to translate musical symbols into sound, is transferring to other abilities since they share similar neuro pathways. For this reason, it would be ideal for children to all be able to take music lessons of some variety. This is something that we also believe at Dave’s Piano Showroom, which is why we invite you to come in and check out our wide array of instruments today.

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What Research Demonstrates in This Regard

Over the past two decades, several researchers have conducted studies of musicians vs. nonmusicians. One study was conducted by the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. In their 5 year study that started in 2012 they reported differences in musicians’ brains in comparison to nonmusicians. Musicians have better language and mathematical skills, a higher IQ, and overall better academic achievement. There are also differences in musicians’ brains related to their hearing and movement.

How Being a Musician Impacts Children’s Development

In the research that’s compared children musicians to nonmusicians researchers have discovered that being a musician positively impacts a child in several ways, including:

• Musicians can more accurately detect changes in pitch but both the musicians and nonmusicians could tell when the melodies were different. To researchers this indicated that musicians are more attentive.
• Musicians’ brain pathways developed faster. This is the part of the brain that’s responsible for encoding and processing sound.
• Even just two years of instrumental training can accelerate a child’s brain development and sound processing. This is beneficial when it comes to language acquisition because language and reading skills engage these same brain areas. Researchers say this is especially beneficial for at-risk children who live in neighborhoods that have low socioeconomic status – areas where children are shown to experience more difficulties with language development.

What These Studies Mean for you and Your Children

There are a lot of benefits for children who are raised as musicians. Clearly this is because musical training has both social and psychological merits. This is especially true when the child is being raised in an underserved community, but it obviously works for all children just the same. This is because the “auditory pathway” that connects your ear to your brain is used to process sound. When you hear something, your eardrums receive it in the form of vibrations of air molecules. These are then converted into a brain signal through a series of elegant mechanisms that go on in your inner ear. That signal is eventually sent to the hearing area of your brain, which is known as the “auditory cortex.” This is located near the sides of your brain. From there your child’s brain is equally impacted on both sides, helping it develop better through even a minimal amount of practice.

Now that you understand how music training can help your child’s brain develop, it’s time to get them started playing the right instrument today. At Dave’s Piano Showroom we can help you select the right one that would be best suited for your home. Stop by and let us help you get your child started down the right path towards music “fluency” today.

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