How I started today playing the piano. 

I took classical piano lessons from about age six and I was reasonably interested in playing but it wasn’t until I started to learn how to play pop music that I really got obsessed! 

My first introduction to using chords is when I took lessons on that one-man-band type keyboard whereby you play a chord in the left hand and you get an automatic accompaniment going in your choice of musical style while you play a melody in the right hand. This was good fun but felt very artificial after a while. 

Then I started getting song books out of the library and I switched playing my chords to the right hand and played bass notes with the left while singing the melody. I started just vamping out rhythms and tried my best to get the right chords from the recording. Using the sheet music to get the chords was good training as I realised that there were subtleties included there that I couldn’t have gotten from listening alone. Having learned to hear the chords I started to hear them in new songs that I came across. A real revelation for me was seeing how Elton and John and Billy Joel used a lot of slash chords. I noticed that piano players were particularly fond of using chord inversions in their progressions. I remember it surprising me to find that I had been playing songs I thought I knew very well with the wrong chords. When I learned the proper chords I couldn’t go back. 

I learned a lot too from playing in bands when I realised that a keyboard player forms only part of the whole.