Playing a Synthesizer Without Piano Training

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ben Anderson with Expert Village. And I'm here today to talk to you about how to play a keyboard without having any prior piano skills. You should probably go out and get a couple piano books. For beginners, that's generally an important thing when trying to learn. The best way to learn doing anything is by actually playing and sitting here and then picking out notes. If you've never played the piano before, but you have a melody in your head, a lot of times what helps is just sit down and start humming the tune in your head, and then try to match the pitch on the piano, just by tinkering around until you can actually find that note. So, say I'm humming a "Hmmm," I would find it here. And then if I want to move up, "Hmmm, hmmm." I found it there. So, to go back from where I started, "Hmmm, hmmm." And from there, you can go and pick out any melody that you--you could hear any song on the radio. A synthesizer is so much more than just a piano. It is a computer, and they come with many built-in different sounds. So, if you're playing in a rock band or if you're playing by yourself, you don't have to feel as though you're limited to one different type of sound. There are so many different sounds. There's piano, for starters. Other important sounds are strings--stringed instruments. Then there are other different synthesizer type sounds. So, it's a matter of finding what sound suits the song that you're trying to improve on. So, even if you have no other prior piano training, if you can come up with some really good sounds on a keyboard to help fill out the sound in a song, you're more than set."