Disclaimer - I am not a pro - just someone who likes to play for fun and make nice music.
Pls ignore little glitches and technique,
Does it sound pleasant?
The shape of a piano chair is almost a dogma. In the risk of sounding silly, I'd like to say that at my age (almost 70) I find it way easier to sit at the piano on a comfortable chair with a high back support. Is this total heresy or some people agree with me?
My previous posts covered voicing, meter and chromatics. This last one in the series is about rhythm feel.
Some songs are melodic while others are dynamic and "jumpy". So while a standard arpeggiated chord keeps equal 1/4 note distance between keys, I use 2 more variants for 4/4 meter:
Swing chord - instead of equal spacing, play the root key long, the middle key short:
C2 (3/8) - G2 (1/8) - C3 (1/4). Then repeat or rest for the last 1/4.
Dual chord - play the root key alone, then after 1/4 note play the 5th and 8th together:
C2 (1/4) - then G2+C3 together (1/4). Two such chords (not necessarily the same ones) fill a 4/4 bar.
I found these simple yet very effective in changing a song's feel without changing a single melody note.
Between these four posts I now have a left hand system that works for almost any song I want to play. Simple enough to sight-read, musical enough to sound good.
In my previous posts I described how I arpeggiate standard chords using 1-5-8.
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Chromatic chords is how I call the chords which are variations on the main chords: seven, diminished, etc.
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I use chromatic chord variations constantly - especially 7 and maj7 chords on Tin Pan Alley songs (like 'The Way You Look Tonight' of Jerome Kern, 1936), where it adds warmth that the standard chord doesn't have. It is common in Jazz, but surprisingly effective in classical pieces too.
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So for chromatic chords I apply simple variations to 1 or 2 of the keys. The root (first key) never changes.
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Let's take C chord as an example. The standard chord (C or Cm) is played as:
C2 - G2 - C3
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7 chord - lower the 3rd key by 2 semitones.
C7 or Cm7 : C2 - G2 - Bb2
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Maj7 chord - lower the 3rd key by 1 semitone.
Cmaj7: C2 - G2 - B2
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Dim chord - lower the 2nd key by 1 semitone.
Cdim: C2 - Gb2 - C3
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Aug chord - Raise the 2nd key by 1 semitone.
Caug: C2 - G#2 - C3
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Similarly:
Cdim7: C2 - Gb2 - Bb2
Caug7: C2 - G#2 - Bb2
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Try it! It is simple and it works.
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When I use arpeggiated chords (as described in my last post), instead of full triad played together, it works great for songs in 3/4 meter. Each key in a standard chord plays for 1/4 note length.
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In 4/4 meter what I do is extend the arpeggio with one more note from the three.
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For melodic songs I typically play the middle note again.
(1-5-8-5). E.g. C chord will play C2-G2-C3-G2.
For dynamic songs I play the last note again
(1-5-8-8)
And at the end of the song I play the first note again (1-5-8-1) or even (1-5-8-5-1). That makes a nice closing.
Works very well for me.
I am not a professional pianist but I play a lot for my own enjoyment. Popular songs, as well as easier renditions of classical pieces.
I use melody and chords as it is much easier for me than 2 full clefs.
I found out that the resulting music can be much more ear-pleasing when the chords are arppegiated, meaning, not playing all the triad together but instead, playing the 3 notes in succession, using the pinky, index and thumb of the left hand.
Also, and that one is quite non-orthodox but yet very effective, I don't play the standard triad 1-3-5 but rather 1-5-8.
Example:
For a C chord, I'd play C2, G2 and C3. For D chord, D2, A2, D3.
A legitimate question would be that this method takes away the distinction betwen C and Cm.
The key is that when the melody is added with the right hand, it usually contains the 'resolver' - the key that makes this distinction.
But the big plus is that the cognitive load is cut in half!
Try it.
I hear this from a lot of people who truly want to play but don't stick with it.
The first lessons go well. You learn where the notes are. You play a simple melody with your right hand and it actually sounds like something. The teacher is patient. You think: maybe I can do this.
Then the left hand comes in.
You practice it separately - that works too. But the moment both hands are supposed to play together, something breaks. The gap between "I can do each hand" and "I can do both" turns out to be enormous. You fall behind the beat. You lose the melody. You stop and start over and over.
This is the wall. Most people who quit, quit here.
But the wall is not only about talent. It's about what you're being asked to do. The brain has to direct each hand to do something completely different, simultaneously, with precise timing. That's not a beginner problem - that's a genuinely hard coordination task, even for experienced players learning new pieces.
The other thing nobody mentions: you have to earn the music and you get bored in the process. Traditional learning asks you to drill exercises for weeks, scales, patterns, things that sound like nothing, before you get to play an actual song. The reward is too far away.
Most people don't quit because they lack ability. They quit because the method doesn't give them anything to hold onto while they're still fighting the wall.
My mother was not a sentimental woman. She was practical and focused on education, on building a future, on making sure her children had everything they need. Not much time for dreams, except one.
She wanted me to play the piano. Not professionally, just beautifully. She used to say: "One day you'll sit at the piano, everyone will gather around you, and you'll thank me."
I quit after a year at age 7. She did not push me too hard but I know she was saddened by it.
She passed away four years before I found my way back to the instrument she had chosen for me as a six-years-old boy. Four years before I learned the songs she used to hum around the house.
She never heard me play. Not properly. Not once.
When the restored 1929 piano came back to my living room with every key alive, a hundred years of history in its wood, I knew something was missing.
I printed a large photo of her and placed it on top of the piano.
It's still there.
Every time I sit down, I can see her face. That practical woman who somehow knew, fifty years before I did, that the piano would find me.
She was right.
I should have told her.
In 1962, my parents brought home a piano.
It came from a family of new immigrants. Europeans who had packed their lives into boats and started over in Israel. Nobody asked many questions about where it came from. It was expensive, it was beautiful, and my mother had a dream for her six-years old son.
You already know how that dream went.
Sixty years later the piano was sitting in my daughter's living room. Yellowed keys. Several silent ones. Scratches everywhere. That particular sadness of neglected things.
I don't know what made me do it. But one evening I looked at it and thought: what if?
I found a young restorer named Nimrod who came, looked at it, and didn't flinch. Six weeks, he said. The next day two large men carried it downstairs, all 300 kilograms, loaded it into a truck. It disappeared.
While waiting I got curious and searched for the manufacturer's name on the front.
Gebr. Zimmermann. Leipzig, Germany. Founded 1884. Originally trained in the Steinway factory.
Then Nimrod mentioned there was a serial number branded into the inner wood.
I looked it up, impatiently. I did not believe I'd find it.
It was built in 1929.
The piano I got as a six-years old - already 33 years old when it arrived - had lived through WWII somewhere in Europe, crossed the Mediterranean on a boat, spent decades in Israeli living rooms, survived my childhood, and ended up waiting quietly in my daughter's home.
Nimrod kept me updated through the process. Even sent me images. I added them here. He really took it apart, filed and painted each part painstakingly.
Six weeks later it came back. Black, gleaming, bright white keys, every key working.
I sat down and played At Last. Indeed.
And I still play on it today. If you can ever love a furniture, this is what it feels like.
When I finally sat down at my new Roland at age 60, I honestly wasn't sure my hands remembered anything at all.
Turns out they remembered exactly two songs.
Yesterday. And Something. Both Beatles. Both picked up in a clumsy self-taught way when I was fifteen. Never properly practiced, never performed for anyone. Just a teenager alone with a piano, figuring out chords by ear.
Forty-five years later, my fingers found them again like old friends.
That moment told me something I hadn't expected: the love never left. It was just waiting around.
But the two songs ran out fast. When I tried anything new I hit a wall pretty quickly. Sheet music felt like a foreign language I once half-learned and completely forgot. Online courses moved too fast. And the gap between playing each hand separately and putting them together... it felt enormous.
I knew what I wanted. Play songs I love, with both hands, sounding like actual music. Not concert level. Just real. Something I could enjoy by myself or share with people around me.
What I didn't know was how to get there without spending years on exercises that sounded nothing like any real song.
That search took a while. But it led somewhere good.
Do any of you have a "muscle memory song"? Something your hands still remember after years away? What is it?
My mother had a dream.
She wanted me to be the kid at the family gathering — the one everyone circles around at the piano, playing beautifully while the room goes quiet.
So she found a teacher. A stern woman in our small town who took piano very seriously. Too seriously, as it turned out.
After one particularly rough lesson she looked at me and said: "If Tchaikovsky heard you now, he would turn in his grave."
I was seven.
I lasted one more year before I quit. Not because I didn't love music — I did. But because I had been taught, very efficiently, that the piano was not for people like me.
That belief stayed with me for fifty years.
Fast forward to my sixties. Retired, more time on my hands. A new apartment. I furnished it with a white Roland Electric Piano, just for kicks.
I sat down and tried again.
And something unexpected happened: the love was still there. Untouched. Perfectly preserved under five decades of "not for you."
It took me a while to find the right approach — one that didn't make me feel stupid or clumsy — but eventually I did. And today I play regularly, songs I love, with both hands, for family and friends.
My mother's dream came true. About fifty years late.
I'm curious — how many of you carry an early discouragement about music that you never quite shook? A teacher, a parent, a sibling who told you that you weren't musical?
I suspect it's more common than we admit.