Starting Songs for Piano

Many people start learning to play piano to learn how to play simple songs when they first start out. It’s fun to listen to someone playing, and can also serve as a very valuable practice tool. When people start learning basic songs, there are a few that are well-known enough that they’re a standard practice. One of the good things about beginning piano songs is that you can take the scale patterns, chords and rhythms and make your own songs out of them. All of the songs are old enough so that they’re in public domain and you don’t have to worry about infringement.

One good song to start with is a traditional Japanese folk song called ‘Sakura’. This is a song that’s really simple because you don’t have any accidentals to look for. I can’t describe the song here, but it starts on A. You can search for it on Google to hear the song as a MIDI file. Open it with a MIDI editing programme like Anvil Studios, where you can look at and print out the note chart. You should practice the melody line with the right hand, and the trills and arpeggio progressions can be played with your left hand. This song is best for practicing interval shifting with fourth intervals.

There’s another song to play on the piano called ‘Fur Elise’. It’s by Beethoven and is more complex than ‘Sakura’. There are more notes to play, as well as a few rather confusing accidentals at times. The song starts on E, and lets you practice more accidentals in addition to descending notes in the second part of the song. Afterward there’s a more complicated part to the song, but it’ll come with practice.

If you want a song specifically to practice arpeggio runs, you can play the United States anthem – ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ The song starts out with G, then goes to E, C, E, G and the C octave. The 2001 Space Odyssey theme is the same, except it skips over the E entirely and just goes from C to G. If you want a patriotic song, go with ‘America the Beautiful’ on the piano, and you can also play childhood melodies and nursery rhymes like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. It really doesn’t matter, this is primarily for practice until you get to more difficult songs.

If you want a different idea, play TV show themes, music from video games, or any type of music that’s simple, if you feel like it’s possible for you to learn it by ear. All it is is a matter of figuring out the song intervals and mapping it in your head. After that you can transpose to different keys. No matter what song you pick, the method of learning it will always be the same.

If there’s other music you want to learn, try downloading it on the Internet as a MIDI file. The score can be printed out with most programmes, and you can use that sheet music to practice. Most people who code MIDIs have a good background in music, so you don’t generally have to worry about the songs being inaccurate. Also, you can play different instrumental parts with MIDI files, because there are often at least a hundred different instruments to choose from.