How to Play Rock Piano Songs

Rock music is music that is all about raw emotion. Sometimes it tells a story, it is often humorous, it doesn’t always make sense, but it is also emotional. Even though most of us think about guitars and screaming vocals when we think of rock music, several talented rockers have proved that a piano can be and equally effective instrument when it comes to rock and roll music.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. If you have never played the piano before you aren’t going to be able to sit down and immediately play Piano Man. Before you try to play your first rock and roll song you should sign up for a few lessons and learn how to play something simple, like Chopsticks. As your lessons progress you will learn about tone, rhythm, style, and chords. One of the important things to remember when you are learning how to play rock music on the piano is that, unlike a guitar, you can't just learn how to play the chords. When playing the piano you have to learn how to read each individual note.

2. As you are learning the basics of piano playing, you should purchase a CD of your favorite rock songs that relied on a great deal of piano in their sound, and you should also purchase the accompanying music. While listening to the CD, study the sheet music. Listen to the dynamics, the tone, and the tempo. Determine what key each of your favorite rock songs are played in.

3. While you are studying the sheet music and listening to the CD your piano playing practice sessions should be spent learning how to play the major and minor and dominant 7th. While you are learning this you should also practice playing diminished and half diminished chords. A chord is playing two or more notes at a time. A diminished chord is a musical chord that has a diminished fifth.

4. Once you learn how to play your 7ths, you need to learn how to invert your chords, these are chords where the bass is not the root chord. The other thing you need to work on is playing the pentatonic scale. Bear in mind that playing in a different key causes subtle differences in the pentatonic scale.

5. Now that you have a solid understanding of the basics, you can reward yourself by trying to play your favorite rock song. Don't expect to play the piece perfectly the first time, even the best piano players need to practice. Most piece of rock music that are written for the piano are written so that you play the melody with your left hand, while using your right hand to play the harmony.

6. One of the things that you may notice while you are playing a rock song is that it doesn't sound like your CD even though you are reading the music correctly. The reason this happens is because most musicians don't rely on simply reading the music when they play.Once they know what the melody and harmony should sound like, they play with the tone and chords, they also add random notes, this process is called improvisation.

Tips & Warnings

• When you are looking for a piece of rock music that you can play on the piano, try to look for a piece that uses a great deal of piano in the melody.