Keyboard Sheet Music

As a pianist and composer I have often wondered what really makes great music for solo piano. Sure there are the classics by Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninov, Debussy - but as piano players we aren’t always skilled enough to master these great pieces. And yet if you love the piano as much as I do, then we still long to play beautiful piano music and bathe in its bliss.

But why solo piano music - why not form a band or orchestra and play simpler parts with others to create great music? Well maybe like me you’ve tried this and found it’s okay but just not quite enough. Because when you play solo piano you are completely free to express yourself, and if you play at home for your own pleasure there are no restraints to your emotional creativity. There is no-one to tell you to play it softer or louder, faster or slower, no-one to tell you to pick another piece. In short, solo piano playing is my favourite musical thing to do.

So how do we find great solo piano pieces that we can learn to play with some ease? There are now many YouTube videos showing you how to play some popular piano pieces - by George Winston or Michael Nyman for example. There are also some free sheet music sites, and others that offer the first page free for you to sample and a small fee for the whole piece. I recently was asked by my daughter to teach her “Bella’s Lullaby” from the movie “Twilight”. We went to MySpace and listened to the whole piece and I worked out most of it by ear but then I discovered a transcription in PDF form which had a few errors. By breaking this down into patterns, it helped her to learn it quite quickly. Unfortunately it didn’t end up being the piano piece used in the final cut of the movie here in Australia, but it is still a lovely solo piano piece to play.

I also learnt something important from teaching my daughter the piano part from the pop song “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton. Once I had taught it to her, she discovered that by playing along to the YouTube video clip, she could improve her playing. Technology is a wonderful way to help with learning music.

There are many websites for solo piano music to listen to and some of them have sheet music too. Do a search on the internet and start finding new and great music to play.