Piano Update and QUESTION
Still working away at learning some early keyboard skills. I really like the set-up I have here, with my keyboard behind my computer, so when I'm downloading something or just need a few minutes to clear my head from what I'm working on I just swivel my chair around and spend ten minutes on the keyboard, instead. I'm still finding it fun and challenging and, whoa, I'm even starting to see some improvement.
I'm mostly working from an instruction book called Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course Lesson Book- Level 1, which seems to be nicely set up with simple progressive lessons and example pieces to learn with each lesson. There's a CD with the book, too, but I haven't needed to use it yet since I read music well enough to handle these early pieces. I've been learning how to play out melodies on both the left and right hand and learning to play chords with the melodies, with the songs switching the hands that play the melody and the chords. That is still quite frustrating to me because being left-handed I find I learn pieces quickly when the chords are in the left hand and the melody in the right, but it's much, much harder when the chords are in the right hand and the melody is in the left. My right hand is very uncooperative when it comes to playing chords- there's just no muscle memory there at all yet. Of course, it occurs to me, too, that besides being naturally left-handed that left hand is also used to doing chords on the guitar, which probably helps with making chords more natural on the piano keyboard, too.
I'm coming along slowly, but surely. It was quite a day when I realized, hey, I can now -smoothly- move from the C chord to the G7 chord and actually play a melody at the same time. No matter how long you've been a musician it still kind of amazes you when you find you can do something totally new on a unfamiliar instrument that you couldn't do the day before. Working on playing simple melodies accompanied by three chords now- C, G7 and F. Still have to practice two chord pieces, though, with my right hand playing the chords (yuck, hard).
So now I can play simple versions of "Merrily We Roll Along", "Jingle Bells", "Are You Sleeping?", and Dvorak's "Largo". I'm presently working on a three chord version of "When The Saints Go Marching In". Yay, me.
QUESTION:
So I'm curious for those of you who play keyboards, do you find having a dominant and non-dominant hand affects your keyboard playing or how you learned keyboard? Do you eventually compensate for that weaker hand and adjust your playing style accordingly? Or did you just keep pushing through and trust your weak hand to become more cooperative?
I'm mostly working from an instruction book called Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course Lesson Book- Level 1, which seems to be nicely set up with simple progressive lessons and example pieces to learn with each lesson. There's a CD with the book, too, but I haven't needed to use it yet since I read music well enough to handle these early pieces. I've been learning how to play out melodies on both the left and right hand and learning to play chords with the melodies, with the songs switching the hands that play the melody and the chords. That is still quite frustrating to me because being left-handed I find I learn pieces quickly when the chords are in the left hand and the melody in the right, but it's much, much harder when the chords are in the right hand and the melody is in the left. My right hand is very uncooperative when it comes to playing chords- there's just no muscle memory there at all yet. Of course, it occurs to me, too, that besides being naturally left-handed that left hand is also used to doing chords on the guitar, which probably helps with making chords more natural on the piano keyboard, too.
I'm coming along slowly, but surely. It was quite a day when I realized, hey, I can now -smoothly- move from the C chord to the G7 chord and actually play a melody at the same time. No matter how long you've been a musician it still kind of amazes you when you find you can do something totally new on a unfamiliar instrument that you couldn't do the day before. Working on playing simple melodies accompanied by three chords now- C, G7 and F. Still have to practice two chord pieces, though, with my right hand playing the chords (yuck, hard).
So now I can play simple versions of "Merrily We Roll Along", "Jingle Bells", "Are You Sleeping?", and Dvorak's "Largo". I'm presently working on a three chord version of "When The Saints Go Marching In". Yay, me.
QUESTION:
So I'm curious for those of you who play keyboards, do you find having a dominant and non-dominant hand affects your keyboard playing or how you learned keyboard? Do you eventually compensate for that weaker hand and adjust your playing style accordingly? Or did you just keep pushing through and trust your weak hand to become more cooperative?