Different ways of playing piano?

Source:Internet    Posted by:Learntopianoonline.com   Date:2010-05-03   Click:

Question:
so i play piano.... and i love it. I'm 17 and i took 4 years of lessons from 6th grade. I stopped taking lessons and now i just play for fun. Like i'll print out sheet music and try to learn the first page. If i feel like im gonna finish the songg... then ill buy it and just learn the whole song. However, sometimes i get frustrated because i just want to play the song already and go to another song or play one of the 5 songs i know by heart.

My dad plays piano by ear and i sometimes get jealous...He plays using music theory! If you don't know what that is... it's how the notes interrelate with each other, and you can kinda figure out what notes to play based on how the notes relate to each other.

Then again... if i know a song really well cause i played if 5 billion times, i can just play it cause my hands know where to go....

i dunno i'm just wondering how other people define their piano playing lol

Answer:
I have a fairly easy arrangement of an old hymn I'll send you for free.
I play mostly by ear. Check me out here:
www.youtube.com/lightrays

I learned Last Date from the sheet music then added my own improvisation.
I've been playing for almost 25 years, am classically trained, but played in a jazz band for a few years, played with a blues group, and have also played keyboards in church bands and the like. The most helpful thing for me to be so versatile has been music theory. If I've heard a song before, I can usually play it with just the guitar chords instead of the sheet music, and the more I learn the better my improvisation gets.
For classical music, I love the challenge of mastering all the layers and complexity, and learning about the intentions of the composers. As I learned more about the structure of the pieces I was playing, my ear playing improved. This really has been the foundation for all the other styles that I've learned to play.
There's no easy way to move from being able to play sheet music okay to being able to play well by ear. You have to put time in and practice. Working through the frustration of mastering a piece until you have it memorized and all the details worked out will help your playing no matter what type of music you'd like to play. Since you're 17, you might be able to take a beginners music theory class at a local community college, and take lessons from someone who is geared toward teaching adult learners. In any case, keep working on it. The better you get, the more fun it is!

I've been playing classical piano for over 10 years (since I was 7)... I don't really wanna say I have a style. I don't. My teacher and I will decide what pieces I should play and I play them until they're worthy of being played in front of an audience and then I either play them in front of an audience or just move on to the next songs. I'd also love to play by ear and improvise. I know my theory but not nearly well enough to just improv. I wish I had perfect pitch. That would make life a lot easier. The way you play and the way I play have their advantages and disadvantages. Yours is advantageous in that you can decide what you want to play and how well you want to play it so that if you get bored of a song you can just move on. Once I start a song, I have to finish it, even if I stop liking it, so it can be more of a hassle than fun at times. However, I'm a lot less likely to develop bad playing habits than you because I have a teacher and I'm also probably improving a lot faster than you are because of it. I'm capable of working through the times when I really don't feel like playing a song and those are rare. I really enjoy playing. I wanna major in music performance.