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It’s a wonderful sight to see the smile on someone’s face when they have just achieved their lifetime dream of playing piano, especially if they previously thought they were too old to learn, or that they weren’t ‘musical’.
This goal is what led me to create a groundbreaking new approach, which has been featured on the BBC and has helped thousands of students in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s to play songs on piano incredibly quickly.
Many of these students thought they weren’t musical, as they had tried piano in the past and had failed.
The reason that they have succeeded with this new ‘DecPlay’ method is that the barriers that prevented them in the past, have been removed.
Many people struggle to read traditional ‘notation’ which is an abstract language of dots and lines used in sheet music.
Notation is great for what it was designed for ie playing classical music, but there is an alternative way of writing down music which is much easier to read and is also more effective for playing popular music, or simple classical pieces such as Pachelbel’s Cannon or Beethoven’s Fur Elise.
As well as being great fun to play, another great thing about popular songs is that they often use very simple musical patterns, which enables us to learn them in an intuitive way, in a similar way to how we learn languages.
By using a form of written music that identifies these patterns (eg chords), even absolute beginners can start to play recognisable songs very quickly.
This is how Paul McCartney learned to play piano, as he explains in the recent TV documentary McCartney 3, 2, 1.
DecPlay extends McCartney’s chord method by harnessing the power of ‘relative numbers’ (as used by Jazz musicians) and translates them into a simple format that beginners can understand.
Also, for the first time, DecPlay enables you to play melodies using numbers, as well as chords. This approach makes the learning process incredibly simple, yet very powerful as it enables you to progress from beginner to advanced level, simply by applying different ‘playing patterns’ to the same sheet of music.
Playing chords also enables you to take advantage of the auto accompaniment features found in some keyboards, which often only requires one or two fingers to be used in the left hand.
The quality of the auto accompaniment can be incredible, especially in keyboards such as the Yamaha PSR-SX and Genos ranges, as can be seen in the ePianos demonstration videos.
As well as making songs much easier to play, auto accompaniment is also useful for students who have dexterity issues with their left hand eg arthritis.
So, where did this approach come from?
After spending 10 years in classical piano training and having spent over 40 years exploring different styles of music (popular, blues, jazz, playing by ear, improvisation etc…) I took the most effective techniques from the different methods and distilled them into the DecPlay method.
Even though DecPlay is incredibly simple to use, it took many years to find the best way to reveal the simple patterns inherent in popular music and replace traditional notation with a more intuitive way of setting out music.
The result is a method that demystifies the way music is constructed and presents it in a way anyone can understand, within minutes.
So, what does this look like in practice?
It means that no matter if you are an absolute beginner or have struggled with piano in the past, you can pick up a piece of DecPlay sheet music and start playing a recognisable melody within minutes, even adding in some accompaniment too!
Ok, so you might need a bit more practice before you start thinking of winning any awards, but hey – if it puts a smile on your face, that’s not bad for a few minutes of effort, and it might well be the first step on a wonderful journey of piano playing 🙂
You can get a free online video lesson that shows you how to play your first song with the DecPlay method, by visiting decplay.com/epianos by clicking here.
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