learning to play the piano

[williamk]

somebody once told me that if you are bassist and you want to be a better musician by learning to play any other instrument, the instrument that comes recommended is the piano/keyboard

does anyone agree with this? and if so how does it make you a better bassist?

absolutely! well, not a better bassist, but a better musician for sure. It is the best and most complete instrument. I think all musician should have basic piano abilities. It is the first instrument I learned and I learned many other instruments so easily afterwards. I really recommend you learn to play. It's also great fun.

 

[dalconthenovice]

wow so many great posts in this thread!
thank you all for the amazing insight
so yes, in the literal three days i've been learning piano i've discovered that my pinky strength on my fretting hand has improved as well as my synchronization between the hands has improved

so far i haven't really goe into the giant ocean of theory and melody concepts involving piano because i'm just trying to be able to make sure my fingers hit the right keys when i want them too

but yes, i already feel the effects of me plyaing piano, and even if they aren't authentic effects? i'm at least having fun with it

 

[JimmyM]

oh, they're authentic...trust me. but when you start getting into, as jeff berlin calls it, the good stuff, that's when the real magic happens!

 

[NineSpine]

Too much thinking getting in the way of doing, if you ask me.

Too much being condescending getting in the way of thinking, if you ask me.

 

[JimmyM]

Too much being condescending getting in the way of thinking, if you ask me.

suit yourself. wasn't trying to be condescending. i guess some people's brains work more analytically than mine. good for designing video games, though maybe not the best thing for learning how to play a new instrument. i always just take the instrument for what it is and work within its parameters as good as i can. i don't bother trying to fix them or find the flaws. nobody's going to fix them by this point anyway.

 

[M0ses]

I'm in total agreement with NineSpine here. But I'm also in total agreement with everyone saying learning piano is a valuable and worthy engagement. It definitely is, and I've just started working towards my Bachelor of Music, which means I've also just started learning the piano. There's no question that learning piano will improve your musicianship. But let's face it. Anyone can play a C major scale with ten seconds of training. But try and get someone with zero musical background to play, say E major, and you've got at ten minutes of telling them which black keys to hit over and over before they can remember it all, and perform it.

So in reality it's quite the opposite of a logically laid out, visually intuitive system. Not only are there two different kinds of keys as NineSpine pointed out, but there are two pairs of white keys that are a different interval apart from each other as all the others! How much sense does that make? It makes plenty of sense if you're playing in C major, but zero sense if you're playing in any other key. Sure it's harder to teach someone to play a C major on bass, but once you've taught them that, they are equally as capable of playing any of the other 11 majors keys as well! It's the same pattern everywhere! All the frets are the same interval apart! Now that's intuitive.

 

[KillerQuebec]

1) As a bass instructor, I spend every lesson near a piano so I can show students what I am thinking and why.

2) If you can count to 4 you can play the piano like Elton John with enough practice.

3) SOMETIMES you will be able to pick out parts on a piano much easier than on the bass.

3) Every good musician (including drummers) can competently play the piano too! It's just part of becoming a well rounded musician.

4) Much easier to learn vocal parts on the piano.

 

[KillerQuebec]

Hey Nine,

A saxophone must cause some kind of hyper OCD response from you.

I'm just kidding.

I thought you made some thoughtful, relevant points.

Now everyone go back to practicing your scales!

 

[totallyfrozen]

So Nine,

What do you recommend for the bass student who posted the OP?
Do you recommend that he NOT learn the piano?

What other instrument should he learn instead?

I used to be a designer at an engineering firm so I'm no stragner to listening to "smart folk" talk at length about their theories and how they've found flaws with everything in the universe. From that, I've learned to apply common sense and to over-simplify things. It's the only way to get past all the wordiness...
So you found imperfections with western music and the piano. OK, now we know what he should not waste his time on.

So what should he spent time learning?

 

[NineSpine]

Killer: When you have something like a sax, the limitations of the instrument physically have to be taken into consideration, so I'm willing to forgive a lot of clunkiness for something where there seemingly aren't better options.

Jimmy: Music is math. It's analytical by nature.

 

[totallyfrozen]

...Now everyone go back to practicing your scales!

Or better yet, practice the chordal notes so that you can more intuitively arppeggiate.

 

[NineSpine]

Frozen: I recommend he learn drums before anything else. It will give him a significantly different outlook on music, and the connection between the drummer and the bassist is arguably the most important part of making a group sound tight. Being able to talk to a drummer from the standpoint OF a drummer is invaluable.

After that, I'd recommend guitar, because it would allow him to explore chords in a way that will translate VERY easily back to his home instrument, bass.

It's not like I said he will learn nothing on piano. I said I think that *for the time invested* I think he can get more out of many other instruments. No instrument is a waste of time, but there is an opportunity cost to any investment of time. As I did earlier, I qualify all of this as simply my opinion. It's not right or wrong, just what I think from my experiences.

 

[Noah Nicoll]

If you play jazz or other improvised music you can't really do without. It's about the ears! As a bassplayer you must really hear every single harmonic nuance to be able to play sensible basslines and to anticipate where the harmonie is going. e.g. in a V-I progression we are told that we can play a tritone substitution, however if the piano player or soloist is playing (or singing) the major ninth of the dominant the tritone would be utterly wrong and sound awful. I know this sounds theoretical, but learning these things from a theory book is not enough, you need to be able to hear them instantly without any thought or conscious analysis else you'll get distracted from the flow of the music and probably be too late with your reaction anyway. It'll be as JimmyM says : 'Too much thinking getting in the way of doing'. To achieve the level of not having to think about what the piano is doing but simply knowing, you'll have to spend a lot of time practising it yourself.
If however you play a style of music where nothing more is asked of you than playing the roots to exact predetermined harmonies, possibly drums or another percussion instrument would be more beneficial to you as a second instrument as your playing will be judged mainly on your rhythmic capabilities.

 

[JimmyM]

Jimmy: Music is math. It's analytical by nature.

yeah but there comes a point where you have to put that analysis to one side and make music. if you spend all your time with the analysis and forget about the sheer beauty of creating music without all that thinking getting in the way, then you've really only learned half of the whole picture.

you've convinced me that you don't think in a way that's conducive to learning the piano because you're not willing to accept it for what it is. me, i totally accept it for what it is...i just suck at moving my fingers in a way that works for it. so neither of us are ever going to be any good at piano. but i'm very glad i know how to work my way around a keyboard and it's been immensely helpful to me no matter how bad i suck at it. and the fact that there are many people who have mastered it and can play their asses off shows me that it can be done unless you look for reasons that it can't be done.

however, i do agree with you that learning drums is also a very valuable skill for the bassist. i started on drums and i'm damn glad i did. whereas most musicians who can't play drums have a hard time communicating with drummers, i have a very easy time of it. but more than anything, learning how a keyboard works will ultimately prove most beneficial. there's just too much evidence that supports it to be denied.

 

[NineSpine]

I think that if you had to pick one instrument, and ignore the time investment, piano will teach you the most. However, I'd contend that you could become decently proficient with two or three other instruments with that same amount of time investment, and that would be significantly more useful.

There's people that have mastered tabla. I hardly think that fact makes tabla the MOST useful investment of time for someone who plays bass.

 

[Jim Campbell]

I design video games. I don't want to get into the minutia of my job, but at the end of the day what I do is fundamentally about engineering systems for people to interact with. You may not think much of that, but I spend at minimum forty hours every week focusing on how human beings interact with things and designing systems based around that. I'm not an idiot or ignorant when it comes to this so I really do not appreciate being treated as though I am. I've designed games which have sold millions of copies, so apparently someone thinks I'm good at designing interfaces (which is what instruments, especially keyboards, are). I'm willing to bet that I've read more books on general design than you've ever heard of. I don't say this because I think I'm so special, but because I am being talked to like a child.

I had to play the piano for years in music school and I had to do so well enough to pass the classes, which was not amazing but also not a trivial level of ability.

If you want to tell me that the modern standard keyboard is not designed around C Major and it's modes, then I don't know what to tell you. That's simply how it is.

Everything has flaws. Every design, from something as simple as a door, has flaws. For example, most doors open one way. That's a design flaw. It's more intuitive in one direction than the either. I could even point out numerous flaws in the keyboard I am typing on right now. There are significantly better layouts that are possible, where the hands will naturally alternate more often based on the most common sequences of letters in the English language. We use this one because it achieved standardization first, but it is actually not a great key layout.

This is very similar to the piano, or even western notation as a whole. The whole system is based around C Major and it's modes, with everything else being treated as abnormal. This is especially true once you leave the modes of the C major scale and move on to more alternative scales. They become increasingly unwieldy and awkward the farther they get from the classic scales. This is a problem that you may notice simply doesn't exist on many instruments, most notably for this discussion, bass.

All 12 notes are an equal distance, relatively, from the one before and the one after it. Having certain notes represented by smaller black keys, as opposed to larger white ones, is FUNDAMENTALLY unintuitive, because it treats things which are identical in relevance as totally different.

If I designed a typing keyboard where the less popular notes were on smaller keys, it would be derided as quite horribly designed, because a single size is significantly more intuitive to the use of your fingers.

Schoenberg had the same opinions as I do about the emphasis of western notation on C Major, so if you want to tell me that he was a moron who was totally wrong and didn't know what he was talking about, and never learned how to play music, well you are entitled to your own opinion, even though you clearly don't think I am.

I recommend the books The Design of Everyday Things, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, The Humane Interface, and Universal Principles of Design if you want to learn about the subject of how humans interact with things.

actually typewriter keyboards were designed this way to slow typists down,as the hammer arms used to bind up with each other.....

as far as piano training goes,i have to disagree.....being able to play or arpeggiate chords on a keyboard is a great way to internalize them,compare different voicings,and add/subtract extensions in a way that is simply not possible on any other instrument......the only down side i can conjure up is that a student might spend less time on his other instrument,but even that seems like quid pro quo.....

 

[JimmyM]

I think that if you had to pick one instrument, and ignore the time investment, piano will teach you the most. However, I'd contend that you could become decently proficient with two or three other instruments with that same amount of time investment, and that would be significantly more useful.

you don't know that, nor do you know that everyone has as much difficulty learning it as you did. personally, i took to it right away and understood how the keys work from the beginning. i just can't move my fingers in a way that makes me play it well. you're saying, "it didn't work for me, therefore it won't work for you." nothing could be farther from the truth.

There's people that have mastered tabla. I hardly think that fact makes tabla the MOST useful investment of time for someone who plays bass.

what the hell does tabla have to do with anything we're talking about here? that was about as irrelevant a comment as you could have made.

 

[J-B'ass]

NineSpine, I'd be interested to hear what you think of the Janko Keyboard?

 

[NineSpine]

Jimmy: My point was responding to your statement "...and the fact that there are many people who have mastered it and can play their asses off shows me that it can be done unless you look for reasons that it can't be done" because it seems to be inferring that the fact that someone can master something means the time investment must be worthwhile for everyone else.

I don't really give a rats ass about my own ability to play piano, because it's totally irrelevant. I watched dozens of other people play piano and it's their experiences that inform my opinion, not my own. I had less trouble than most of the guitar or bass players, to be honest.

I never said it would be a waste of time. I never said it was impossible to play piano. I never said you learn nothing from piano. I simply said that I think that more can be gained *within a set amount of time* for a bass player on other instruments. You are responding to my position as though it is significantly more extreme than it is.

You seem really hell bent on making the point that I must suck and therefore have an invalid opinion, which I have to say I think is really beneath your normal demeanor.

J: I think the Janko is infinitely superior. In a world that wasn't so obsessed with tradition and fearful of change, the Janko would be standard. Personally, I prefer the harmonic table, although the harmonic table does gear itself towards consonance.

 

[JimmyM]

wow, i thought i was being nice!

i think i know where we get off point from each other...you're looking at it from an ability/performance standpoint that you're better off learning how to play instruments that are (arguably) easier. it all greatly depends on the person, but i might be inclined to agree. guitar and drums were certainly easier for me, along with the 4 or 5 other instruments i can sort of play.

but for purposes of this discussion, i'm looking at it from a general all-around knowledge pov, and ability/performance is the least of my worries. and from that angle, it cannot be argued...piano is by far the best instrument to learn because of its visual aspect. not only can you hear the relationships between notes, but you can see them, and for that reason alone, it's got tremendous value. learn how to double on guitar, and you can hear the relationships, but every fret looks like every other so it's not intiutively visual. and piano is also a tremendous reference if you write music, even if you can't play it very well. you're only limited to the notes you can play at one time by the amount of fingers you have, so it's a lot easier to experiment with chords. guitar is great for chords as well, but it's got nothing on the keyboard because of its visual aspect. sorry, but that just plain can't be argued.

so if you want to learn instruments that you can perform on, learn whatever you want. but if you want to have a deeper understanding of chords and note relationships and an all around better understanding of how music works, piano > everything else.