Playing the Piano for the Rest of Us...

For Beginners.No Reading Sheet Music Required!"Playing the Piano for the rest of us" is a course created for people who want to play the piano without having to commit to years of study and practice before being able to play songs they really want to. Finally a piano course for people who want to play with other musicians without having to learn to read sheet music, to enjoy themselves or be included in groups, like church groups or bands, or just friends and family. Most of the piano instruction I have seen falls into two categories... it's too hard, so you quit, or, it doesn't teach enough foundational skills and knowledge so the only thing learned is how to play songs that the course taught. I like the saying, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime". This course hopes to be part of the latter, for people who want to play and enjoy the piano or keyboard. Many existing courses teach too much at once like classical piano finger-skills, music theory and how to read sheet music. Students often get lost and discouraged somewhere between reading sheet music and having too hard of a time getting their hands to work together, others teach a set of playing skills that allow the student to play a limited amount of songs or music, but no freedom to find and play what the student really wanted to in the first place. Classical training is fantastic, but can often times be overkill for people who want to accompany others or want to play and / or sing using chord music. Ultimately the student gets rolled over from too much and too hard of a learning curve, like a wave that came crashing down on their hopes and dreams. Some training methods don't provide enough foundation to enable the student to continue growing themselves, at their own pace, as they desire after they've completed the course. This course hopes to open the door for people to play the piano and then release them to grow-on! Learning to read chord music is the difference between a person having to "learn, read and interpret an extremely complicated map with a key of over 20 symbols", compared to having to read a simple map of "start point, landmark, end point".
About the Author: Victor Aramanda is the younger of identical twins. He was an air-force brat who grew up in the USA, Spain, Germany, Spain, and the USA in that order, was a parachute infantryman, was in full-time ministry for more than eight years, is a husband and father, taught many conferences, lead praise and worship, lived with his family in a missionary work in the UK and in the USA, has many skills and talents. How I started playing the piano... I began my experience with the piano by taking lessons in college from a great instructor. It turns out I was being taught how to play through classical training. I passed my course, but I hit a wall called "I read music like reading a foreign language I vaguely know." This killed any passion I had to play, I couldn't get over the wall. I stopped playing or even trying because I had lost hope in reading music fluently. I still loved music, it's as though my piano training was somehow put into hibernation. I sang in church sometimes and started to notice that the pages of music that we were using to sing from had the words to the songs on the paper and then a set of letters placed over the words every now and then. It turns out that the letters were all the musicians needed to know how to play the songs! I was told that the letters represented the series of "chords" that made up the songs. A few years later I was putting my classical piano training to use by trying figure out the chords to an easy worship song I wanted to play. A musician saw and heard me playing the song and gave me a tip on a simpler way to play that was outside of the classical training box I didn't realize I was stuck in. When I applied this small piece of instruction something broke inside me that use to say, "I can't play music because I can't read sheet music". That is when I began to grow and understand the actual concepts I have built into this course. It's as though God broke down the wall that stopped me from playing the piano for years in a matter of minutes! Now I hope to be able to share this with other people that want to play.