Teaching By Ear, Initial piano lessons Options

[barcarolle]

I have a male adult beginner whose aim is to be able to make up his own stuff. I want to teach him by ear for the moment and am wondering where to find material to do this. If it was a child I'd use nursery rhymes etc. , but that's not really suitable for an adult. I am thinking of finding an adult beginner singing book and using that as my basis. Does anyone have any ideas?

I usually dive straight into a tutor book but want to try getting away from that for the timebeing.

[Digby]

I'm not really sure whether this will help or not but I'll go for it anyway!

With adults I usually use the Carol Barratt classic course, or the Bastien adult piano course. I had a student who whatever we started doing, he could always hear other things within it, so for example in the Barratt there is a gavotte, I think by Handel, so we learnt that one in full, then improvised it into Eric Claptons Wonderful tonight!

The great thing about the Bastien though, is it does work with chord structures and intervals so you could take familiar pieces in addition to the book (and I have no issues with making adults work out Twinkle, twinkle little star and the like) work out the melody then use the Bastien in conjunction with improvisation to add the harmony.

Option 3, links into your song book idea, try looking through some of the easy keyboard, guitar song books that have the chords written at the top and the simple melody line in, I've used these with adults and kids before to build confidence, they do tend to be very mainstream artists though, Beatles, Abba, Disney etc. The easy keyboard ones do have chords marked out, in them.

Sounds like a great challenge though, so have fun.