We purchased a keyboard last year for my daughter to learn to play piano, and now we’ve gotten a chance to use it with my sons as well. Our latest musical review item has been the Easy Piano Basics course from JazzEdge.
Easy Piano Basics is a 32 lesson online course for the piano beginner. This is for the real newbie, but works well for a child or an adult. I would say that it would be best for ages 6 and up, or younger with an adult there to help out.
You receive lifetime access to the lessons, which makes sharing it with your whole family easy. Adults that want to begin or brush up on piano skills and children hoping to learn how to play will all have the chance with this program.
There are videos for each of the lessons. The instructor, Willie, can be seen on the screen on the bottom left, and the piano he is playing on can be seen over the rest of the screen. This makes lessons easy to follow and very specific for the visual and auditory learner.
Along with each lesson are suggestions for Practice work to be done during the week. You can also download the video if you’d like to have it on your devise for viewing when internet access is not available.
Additionally, there is a download available that includes all of the sheet music needed for each lesson. Not every lesson has sheet music, but some lessons have several to print out. We printed ours out all at once to have available when we got to the next lesson.
The lesson topics range from how to sit at the piano to time signatures to chord symbols to basic rhythms. For an idea of the style of the video lessons, you can check out the JazzEdge Youtube Channel.
Our Experience
I used this with my 5 year old, and my 8 year old did tag along while we watched the videos. The lessons were short, fun, and lighthearted. The instructor, Willie, is so patient and down to earth. He speaks right to the student in a relatable way without making them feel silly for being brand new to the instrument.
My 5 year old was able to understand it to an extent, but he forgot some of the information quickly, so we had to do a lot of practice. For him, we ended up doing a lot more actual practice on the keyboard than we did watching the videos.
The lessons made that easy, because underneath each video, there are specific things that the student is supposed to be practicing during the week. This was my favorite part, because we obviously spent more time doing hands-on keyboard practice than we did time watching the videos. These recommendations gave us something simple, yet important, to try between videos.
My son enjoyed the videos and didn’t make a fuss about doing some work on the keyboard. He appreciated that he videos were never very long, so it kept his attention. He practiced about 4 times a week.
I enjoyed that the lessons were easy to access any time. The option to download videos was neat for having the ability to take them with us on the go. I loved being able to print out the sheet music to go with the lessons.
I recommend these lessons to beginner pianists, young and old. I promise that you won’t feel silly completing the lessons, and you’ll learn quite a bit very quickly. With a little bit of a time investment, I think an adult or older child could complete this course within a few weeks or months. For younger children, or someone that needs extra practice, it can take a bit longer.