Darswords

Popular Piano Self Taught by Win Stormen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After returning to my piano, having neglected it for decades, life, you know, I went from playing five minutes to now nearly an hour most days. I only play as long as I enjoy it and stop when it feels like work.

I seemed to have gotten stuck in my decades of lessons and classes. I play what I see, mostly classical. But I have mostly wanted, all my life, to play easily without sheet music before me. Making it up like others I have known could do. That is my new goal. Obviously, this has been a goal since I was 12! I’m 75 now. I looked at how hard my teacher, Mrs. Skinner, had tried to introduce young me to pop music. She knew I wanted to sing with my playing. So she gave me pop music to play with. I have stickers from the many pop songs she taught me.

Even still, I played merely what I saw, not by ear. Recently, I tried one of the tricks she tried for me. I started playing the ukulele. It is the one instrument that lets me sing while I play. I could go rogue.

As I started going through my old books, I found this book, Popular Piano Self-Taught, with the collection still with me from long ago. What the heck? I decided to give it a try at last.

Much of the book was a review of what I’d learned in lessons or long years of college classes. But those I much I needed to remember. But the practical lessons with chords and rhythms were invaluable. I printed up much that I intend to keep practicing until it becomes natural. I have a couple of modern pieces I was playing with that became easier once I learned from this book. I can’t judge how well the book was based on my progress; I need a lot of work. But I think it will be a great book for others to try to gain more musical abilities at the piano.

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