Mikes Music Room – Music Articles

When you have a child and they are old enough to walk, then they are old enough to begin looking at playing instruments.Many of the greatest musicians in the history of music have started out incredibly early. Mozart himself was playing the piano at the age of three and composing operas before he was 10 years old.

Of course, your child is probably not going to end up to be Mozart, but that does not mean you can’t start them early on the path to musical kinship.

Being a musician means that when your child is having trouble dealing with life, or they are depressed for whatever reason in the future, they will have the outlet of music to express their desires, hopes, dreams and fears. They will be able to use music as a tool to help themselves, and countless musicians in history have done exactly the same.

Like a writer or an artist, musicians use music to help them come to terms with the world around them and help make it a better place for themselves. This is why it is so important that you help your child learn how to play an instrument at a young age.

It can be tough at first to get your child to commit to learning an instrument, but the important thing is that you do not push it on them. You need to allow them to take their own time to learn how to play the instrument, because if you force it on them, they will only resist it.

Buy used instruments and allow them to choose which one they like. They may hate the guitar but love the bagpipes, they may hate the piano but love the accordion. As a result, you need to be able to find the instrument that is right for them to keep them happy.

It can seem daunting to go through this process of trying to find something your child will enjoy playing, but if you commit yourself to only buying used instruments, you will save oodles of cash and your child will not have to suffer through being unable to let their musical gifts wander. Buy used instruments and help them reach their full potential and do not be afraid to start them early on the path to musical greatness.

Music is a wonderful thing and it has the power to turn children into inspired little beings that love to play a note on the piano or dance around with a guitar. Plus, you never know when you buy an instrument, if it is going to be something your child will take off with. You could be helping the next John Lennon or Bruce Springsteen in their future legendary career. It may amount to nothing, it may amount to fame and fortune, what is important however, is that you allow your child to reach their full potential with the instrument they choose to play. Musical is a wonderful gift that you can give to your child.

Victor Epand is an expert consultant for used CDs, autographed CDs, and used musical instruments. You can find the best marketplace for used CDs, autographed CDs, and used musical instruments at these sites for used children CDs, children autographed CDs, and used children”s musical instruments.

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All that matters is your child’s experience at the piano. It doesn’t matter what other people think, what others expect, even what the piano teacher thinks is irrelevant.

What matters is that your child has a chance to experience playing the piano, however humbly, and enjoys what they are able to do. Even attempting the piano is a success.

Looking at children at the piano as a group, with statistical expectations that one child will live up to someone’s ideal of a musician, is actually destructive to the child.

No one in their right mind expects their child to play at Carnegie Hall: what we’re looking for is hobbyists and aficionados, not piano virtuosi and superstars.

Let me assure you that if your child has what it takes to play Carnegie Hall, it will be so obvious that no one in the piano business will miss their cue. The number of children that have that in the cards for them are so few, that it is not even a real number.

Take all the wildly talented children, divide by 10,000, and then pick one. That one child has a 1% chance of a successful career as a piano soloist. But all children, properly nurtured, have a 100% chance of playing simple songs at the piano, feeling great about it and adding to their general education and intellectual skills.

It’s more productive to think in terms of your child as an individual. Let’s get that individual child to play as well as they can, without stress, without wildly unrealistic expectations.

In fact, the point of early childhood music education is not expertise, but exposure to the intellectual and abstract concepts inherent in music that will help their minds grow.

To demonstrate the proposition that children’s piano lessons increase mental powers, we need to look at the human brain itself.

The brain, divided into two sides, controls each hand with the opposite side of the brain. The left brain controls the right hand, while the right brain controls the left hand.

The two sides “speak” to each other via a huge superhighway of nerves and ganglia called the “corpus callosum.” The reason the piano is so beneficial for children intellectually is that the piano, in having both hands work together in similar ways, forces the brain to use both halves of the brain simultaneously. There are very few activities on earth that excite the “corpus” like music and piano.

And so piano activity demonstrably produces better handwriting, better math skills, better abstract skills and higher self-esteem, all through having the two sides of the brain talk to each other, over and over until the nerve path is physically thickened.

That’s right, there is a PHYSICAL result in your child’s brain as a result of playing the piano, even attempting the piano. It is a known medical fact that the “corpus callosum” (that nerve path between the brain’s two sides) of musicians is up to 90% larger than that of people who are not musicians. And starting piano at an early age begins those benefits early in life.

So if your child is not destined for Carnegie Hall, they may still be destined to enjoy, appreciate and create music. And have a thicker corpus callosum!

The saddest part of music education today is that piano lessons are, as they always have been, designed to produce candidates for Carnegie Hall, not fully rounded and nurtured individuals who try to play piano to the best of THEIR ability.

Children who, with a little care, could gain all the benefits of a piano education are made to feel like failures because they cannot live up to a curriculum developed hundreds of years ago to produce professionals.

It’s time to let kids be kids and not rob them of the benefits of piano because they don’t fit some misguided teacher’s idea of accomplishment.

Start looking at the piano from the child’s point of view.

By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2000 Walden Pond Press. Visit http://www.pianoiseasy.com and see the fun PIANO BY NUMBER method for kids.

John Aschenbrenner is a leading children’s music educator and book publisher, and the author of numerous piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER.

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It used to be not too long ago that the only way to receive lessons for playing the piano were through a music studio or private lessons through an instructor or music tutor. That has all changed thanks to the Internet and the processing speed of the home computer.

Piano lessons in general were a fright for most kids growing up. Instead of being outside playing with their friends, they were stuck inside practicing their notes on the piano. Luckily this was only once a week as these private lessons were expensive. After some time, the tutoring stopped as the piano was never really grasped by the student due to disinterest. Now that these kids are grown up, they long to be able to play and wish they had practiced more. Still, private lessons from a qualified instructor are expensive, so where do they turn to when they wish to learn the piano but can’t afford private lessons?

An online course is much cheaper than a private lesson. If a private lesson costs 30 or 40 dollars per week, just think about how quickly that adds up. You can take an entire online course in piano for a fraction of the costs that you would acquire taking weeks of private lessons. Also, private lessons are only usually one hour per week. If you have questions during the rest of the week, or if you forget something that your teacher said, you will have to wait for your next lesson to continue your learning. However online piano courses are quite different.

With an online piano course, you can work at your own pace. As long as you have a computer to access the internet, and speakers to listen to the lessons, you can learn as much or as little as you’d like. You can also take as many lessons per week as you’d want, or go back and listen to your last lesson if you have forgotten anything. Most adults who want to learn how to play piano enjoy being able to go back and listen to their previous lessons. It can give you a good idea of what you were doing right, what you were doing wrong, and what you should be doing before the next lesson.

Of course, if you need someone to sit beside you and offer you instant feedback as you are playing, you might not benefit from an online piano course. Most people find, however, especially adult learners, that they are able to tell when they are playing something right and when it is wrong, so they don’t really need an actual instructor to sit next to them. The lessons online can be viewed at any time, or as often as you’d like, which means that you can get your own type of feedback from an online piano course. If you have the money for a private instructor, you might not choose to go with internet courses. However, most people will say that they benefit from the online courses.

Trying to find an accredited or worthy online virtual piano course might prove difficult if you don’t know what to look for. Call around to companies that sell or service pianos; they are sure to have the information you need. Some also operate the online sites and are more than happy to get you online and more importantly into their stores.

For more valuable information about piano lessons check out online piano lessons

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