Making the most of keyboard real estate

This week I got an interesting question from a guitarist friend on Google+. He wanted to know if there are any conventions with respect to orienting oneself to the keyboard. This is the picture he showed me:

While there's nothing false here, it's not very useful for actually playing. After all, most of us have two hands instead of three. Here is another approach:

As you can see from the image, there is a rough "zone" where the left hand plays and another for the right hand, although there are no hard and fast rules about this.

Generally, the right hand will take the melody, and you'll harmonize with the left hand. You can also harmonize by playing keys with the right hand below the melody, and sometimes even coming up with fills that incorporate higher notes in between melodic phrases.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Below the green dot, try not to use intervals smaller than a fourth. Playing two notes of a smaller interval at the same time (a harmonic interval) will sound muddy, and playing them in succession (a melodic interval) will often sound clunky and amateurish unless you're playing a melody, countermelody, or specific bass line. Expand your voicings to use the full range of the piano and the full range of your fingers.
• If you are playing a melody, you'll generally want to keep it between the green dot and the blue dot.
• It is appropriate to split chords between two hands. Generally, you would play the root as your lowest note in the left hand unless something else is specifically called for.
• Pianists often repeat chord tones within a voicing. A triad (three-note chord) might have as many as seven total keys involved in order to create a full sound on the piano.
• The piano has a huge range. Don't be afraid to use very high or very low notes to create color or to "get out of the way" of other instruments and carve out your own sonic space.

I hope these tips will help you in exploring the piano and its possibilities!

Guitar Technique Tips for Young Beginners (with video!)

If you're a parent or teacher working with a guitar student under the age of ten, this video is for you!

Here, I'll demonstrate some things to look out for in order to make sure that young guitarists are building the strongest possible technical foundation for their playing.

Older students can sometimes fudge technique, but getting anywhere on the guitar is pretty much impossible for little kids who don't have solid skills.

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How to instantly make your piano playing sound more professional

The great thing about playing pop and rock songs by ear is that the sound and feel of your playing is up to you. I guess that's also the bad thing about it - there's no written score to guide you and infuse your playing with appealing licks and time-tested voicings. Here, I'd like to share a simple left-hand technique that will make you sound a lot better right away.

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Noise vs. music: Seeking better toy instruments for young children

There's a bell curve of children's musical instruments that looks something like this:

As you can see, under this distribution a crappy birthday-party noisemaker actually fares better than a Steinway grand piano. Why is this?

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The secret to coordinating your hands

Many would-be pianists have told me that they stalled out on the piano because they just couldn't get their two hands going at the same time. "First I learn one hand," the story goes, "and then I learn the other, but I can't stick them together!"

The thing is, that's not how pianists think. Flute, saxophone, trumpet - these are instruments that can only create monophonic (i.e., one note at a time) textures. The very nature of piano is polyphonic (many voices), and most of the music written for the instrument takes advantage of this.

But polyphonic does not equal "monophonic plus monophonic" - you can't just learn the parts separately and mash them together. You'll need a different strategy.

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