Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum No music backgroun but Play for my girlfriend.

as a sidenote when i started out learning piano i got ancy and wanted to learn a piece that i really loved (was actually a FF piece also), it did take me about 2 months....to be able to perform the FIRST PAGE musically... i be no means am especially talented... but without the necessary facility to back you up it is not an easy task..

Thanks J. T.

I'll let you know how much progress I've made in a month and take it from there.

Best of luck to you!

One of the things that makes this piece is the proper use of pedal. You haven't told us what you do and don't know about music so far. The notes of a particular chord are spread out and played one at a time, and they are blended together via the pedal. Then the next chord comes along (ditto), the pedal is changed so that they don't mix with the first bunch and create mud. Here is one specific skill you would need to get a handle on in order to pull it off. It is a matter of coordination, on top of coordinating the two hands. You need some kind of plan to approach this - can you at least get someone to tutor you for the piece?

A lot of beginner music has repeated chords that are always the same, along with simple melody which mostly falls on the beat. In your chosen piece there are sequences of chords one after the other, and then varying rhythms in the right hand which fall on and between beats. That is another thing to contend with.

I'm not a teacher and I'm still learning myself, so these are only off-the-cuff quick observations.

Yep, I remember agreeing to take ballroom dancing with my wife about 25 yrs ago ... BW7, do you realize how long it takes to teach a dancing bear to dance?


But Good luck!!

I think it's worth a try!

Use Synthesia to help you find the notes.

Learn just one part of the song. If that's all you end up learning, that's enough! I think it's very do-able if you end up playing even 30 seconds worth - for her.

And if this passion inside you carries you forward into a love affair with the piano, great!

Good luck!

Well in that case....

What we've been discussing is to play properly with a half-decent performance. Since you are so press for time, I would say forget about learning properly and just learn to press all the notes in the right order. Forget about pedaling. You may try pressing down the sustain pedal about 1/3 or 1/4 down to fatten the sound a little and hold it there for the whole song. This works on an acoustic piano, not so much on keyboards. And worse case, you could edit out sections of the middle and just learn the beginning and end and splice the two together. Best of luck to you.

For the third piece? I wouldn't think so.

I wouldn't think so about this whole enterprise. Unless the OP is a genius, which he (by his own admission) is not, the capability to learn to play the piano in two months simply does not exist. He has asked if it's possible, and why are we lying to him?

Well, basically I'm saying there is no time to learn it so forget it. Or as I said, if he wants to use it, just use it a little like 1/4 pedal hold for entire piece. That is easy enough to manage so he could focus on pressing the right keys. It'll be messy for sure, and at this point, I doubt he is shooting for decent performance.

I feel like this is like American Idol when everyone is telling you no, I will give you a yes. There are quicker way to learn and play the song ( may be not exactly like the original) but not much different.
For example is you look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YPPWShawyU , try to play the harmony chord ( since you don't read music its the red color on the keyboard) and ONLY the top note of the melody for now ( top note = the most right note on the keyboard). You can ignore the rest of the middle orange notes for now since they are what we call embellishment on the chord, and add them in as much as possible once you have master the overall simply song structure.
I remember many moons ago I started piano also for a girl as well, and one songs turns into a passion for 30 some years. Worst comes worst, the only song you play is absolutely recyclable to the next girl comes along

This ^ BigWillo7, maybe this will be the start of a long relationship for you - with the piano!

Best of luck to you!

... just one piece in 2 months.

It is not a lie ... just a huge stretch. Also, might you be forgetting something?

Surprising to me as you normally come across so warm ...

I second this. If you really want something to play for her, look for like few bars long arrangement for piano starters for some love song or song she likes. slow song. one note per hand. Unless you are extremely gifted (to an extent) you will not do anything more than few bars from these pieces, spending like two hours daily on the piano, asking yourself how to play that scary thing.

I will tell you, that you will not be able to learn properly to play even the first few bars from memory. Sorry, they are difficult pieces, and even many starters told you that they are to hard for them after a year or more.

Get over this and find the new idea.
Sorry, but you will only lose your time and nerves and she will probably not be pleased by your horrous execution. and, after two months, you will realize, that you mostly lost your time. Maybe do some beutiful origami rose or whatever, it's really easier to learn than piano playing in your case.

Well, there is always possibility that you will love the piano, but, it's life-long journey.

If you want to have some benchmark, go and listen how and what people are playing after few months or years.

I bet everyone on the origami forum is cringing at this comment

It's amazing how the uninitiated completely underestimate the difficulty of playing piano. It's not easy like operating a pro-level digital SLR or programming a VCR. They think it's no harder than most things adults have experience like learning to operate a stick-shift car in traffic, which most people could be proficient after one month of practice.

Synthesia is neat tool. But the problem is most beginners touching a piano for the very first time has the musical memory of far less than a minute like Brian said. Even if someone showed me all the notes of this song (below) when I first started piano, there is just no way to remember it all in a couple of months. Learning to read the score is actually easier? Of course we are throwing away entirely the issue of quality. Then add in performance stress when you are actually playing it back for that important person.

Well the things is anybody I mean anybody can knock out a tune on a piano, the difficulty is in playing well and putting together a performance which flows

This piece here I can kinda play it, but the when it gets to 1/8 and 1/16th notes I just don't have the speed and flow to make it sound anything other than clunky.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXCzaJh7Gj0

OMG 8 Octaves, I love that Frozen Synthesia!! I just watched it twice in a row.

It's an awesome arrangement and super fun to watch the comments on the screen! What do you think, 3 or people could maybe do it? 5?

So what is the significance of different colors in Synthesia? Like the purple runs up and down the keyboard? Does that mean someone played those in one take and the other colors were played in a different take? Or, was none of this ever played and the arranger just typed it in and the computer played it? (Sorry, I know nothing about Synthesia or MIDI stuff)

In synthesia light blue is left hand, green is right hand.

When a midi file which has multiple instruments is played they use different colours to signify each instrument.

Bad apple is a good example:

about 10 different pianos


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF16HpGtuHc

Of course some REALLy fast people can play multihanded stuff IRL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFWTF8ImmBE

vs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8-fnHl7mbw

Wow, Marasy8 is all fast-fingers! This one I know (it was made for Hatsune-Miku IIRC) but his version is better IMO!



But I can't stand to listen to the Ura-omote Synthesia that you linked -- sorry! No offense meant, but I dislike those computer/synth sounds. That's part of why I like the Let It Go Impossible Synthesia, because it's just piano sounds. Bad Apple is fine too, but probably even more impossible than Let It Go.

Sorry for the thread drift everyone!