How To Play Piano

Hello! My name is Matthew Forbes from The Music Workship Company. I'm going to take you through how to tune some instruments, how to play them, basically, and also how to read the notated music form. Very briefly, how to play the piano.

We have obviously the two hands- we want to spread the notes as evenly and appropriately as possible over the two, so we want to be sitting absolutely centrally to the instrument. Middle C is here. It's a good place to feel, that's in the middle.

The pedals, we'll get on to in a minute. About the keys themselves, my hands can reach the octave between two notes- the C and the C here, fairly comfortably. So, you have your fingers curved so the ends of the fingers are going into the keys and you sink down onto the keys from above, so you don't feel that it's too hard, it's just a sort of soft touch with both hands there.

Now, in order to get at any of the keys, you need to be above them so that you can reach whichever key you need to in a hurry. As far as the black keys are concerned, generally, we tend to use only the four fingers on the black keys, rather than the thumb. And you keep them moving to a minimum if you can.

Often, the thumb tucks under on the way up. So, we're able to connect the two sounds without it being too jumpy. Same as with if we're outlining chords.

And the same for the left hand. Often, baselines go into power octaves, and we use the little finger and the thumb to spread those octaves comfortably onto the hand. The pedals- the left pedal is the soft pedal, and that takes the sound to a quieter place than without it.

The right pedal is the most commonly used, and it's the sustaining pedal. Without using the pedal, the keys sound the note and then silently and softly lift off. With the pedal, if I put the pedal down, the sound continues until I lift off with the foot.

It's best for the quality of sound of the piano to put the pedal down just after you've hit the note. Otherwise, the sound gets a little bit mushy. So we're going to try to put the pedal down just after you've played the note, so the tone is really at its best.

But that is how to put your fingers over the keys of the piano and to play as well and as easily as possible. .