For me it was the other way 'round, started on piano at very young age, complete with lessons, didn't even THINK about a guitar until around the age of 12 or so.

So I don't think I'd have much insight into doing it from the other standpoint, at least as to methodology.

I will state this, though:

There are MANY great improvisational musicians who have played instruments other than piano who insist that knowledge of the piano keyboard is something that the aspiring and working musician should pursue.

As a result, many fans may not realize just how well some of them could play the piano, knowing them only from the aspect of their wellknown target instrument.

Dizzy Gillespie, the great trumpet player who had a hand in the invention of BeBop - and may have been the guy who named it as well - was a fantastic piano player. He used the piano to figure out things, compose, find out what modes, scales, chords, etc. worked over what changes and stated that he wrote several of his well known Standards at the piano, often by finding something on the keyboard that led him to turning it into the entire piece.

Arturo Sandoval, the great Cuban trumpet player also plays piano so well that he has released albums of his piano playing as well as the many albums featuring his amazing facility with his first instrument, the trumpet.

Joe, you like books and magazines.

For any beginning piano player or keyboardist, I recommend getting hands on the following books:

The Schmidt Piano studies

The Czerny

The Hanon

Those three are all about fingering really, and can, if used properly and practiced, prevent the problems that many self-taught keyboardists have to overcome, such as the dreaded "running out of fingers" due to not knowing how to properly finger a scale or run in a certain key.

The piano keyboard represents a "Number Line" in which all the notes are laid out in a row, and each note is only in one place, unlike, say, the guitar.

I can't imagine how those who don't know the piano keyboard envision the ins and outs of theory and harmony without it. (Of courae, there are those that do, that's not the point.)

Obligatory sidebar "Mac-Story":

I once read that a very young Wolfgang Mozart, at somewhere around age of three, was caught by his musician father sitting at dad's piano, something that just about every child does after first seeing and hearing and adult play and then gaining access to the keyboard.

But in Mozart's caae, he was not doing what most toddlers might do, such as happily pounding out sounds.

He was very thoughtfully playing one note with one finger of one hand while playing another note with one finger of the other hand.

His father demanded to know what the little boy thought he was doing, and this is what Wolfie told him:

"I'm trying to find the notes that LIKE each other!"

And that is what it is really all about.


--Mac

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