I have recently taken on a new pupil who's been having piano lessons 'on and off' for a while. I don't think much, if any, teaching's gone on and I think a lot of what he can do is self-taught.

Although he's been learning on a piano and has a digital piano at home, he's done some keyboard stuff (i.e. play RH melody and read chord symbols for LH) and some piano (working on Grade 2 pieces). He knows that eventually, if he wants to do piano, he needs to move away from the keyboard stuff to a certain extent...but...I think it's unfair on him to just abandon what he's done up to now and I wonder how I can make use of it? We're carrying on with the Grade 2 piano pieces he's started and that's fine - obviously I want to move more towards that.

His 'keyboard' playing is pretty good - he reads the chords quickly and plays with quite a bit of variety in the LH. Wondering how I can make use of this alongsisde the 'piano' stuff?

Hi Seer_Green,

I left piano playing many years ago to play keyboards with a function band, chord shapes in LH and melody in RH. When I returned to playing piano a few years ago, even though I had always tinkered away on an digital Yamaha Clavinova at home, I knew my LH was a lot weaker than my RH.

My wonderful teacher gave me lots of scales, technical exercises to do and told me for every time I played something with my RH, I should do it twice with my LH.
A lot of what I began playing with her was baroque or classical, where the left hand would be imitative or there would be melody and accompaniment. It definately encouraged me to hear where my LH needed a lighter touch, less weight, more evenness etc.
It has improved greatly but it's still not as controlled as I'd like it to be!
I would encourage your pupil to continue to play the keyboard material they enjoy , but that it has to be alongside what your doing and the reason is to try to strengthen and improve the balance between the hands.
Good luck!

If he's happy reading chords for the left hand, could you turn him into a continuo and instead of reading G7 or whatever, get him to respond to 3 5 or 6 4 in the bass part.

A melody hymn book with guitar chords above might work - you could then move on to reading the 4-part arrangements?

Hi Seer Green,

I started off on electronic keyboard myself (about a decade ago) before starting piano about a year later. I continued with both keyboard and piano until I was grade 5 keyboard, and then I've continued with piano ever since. I personally think that learning about chords through keyboard playing has benefited me greatly in learning about music generally: from learning about cadences in classical music to learning about chord progressions in popular music to studying complicated chords in jazz music.

One practical suggestion I would make for making use of his chords is to study how he can play proper 'accompaniments' in his LH using arpeggios, broken chords etc, rather than just playing the 'plain' chord as you would do on keyboard.

For example, for ballady-type music, or gentle folk music (think Titanic, Ashokan Farewell, Sometimes when we touch, Love me tender and many more), for each chord I play the root position triad in LH and then move the 3rd note of the chord up an octave, and then play the notes in quavers and using the pedal to give a full, rich sound. E.g. for the chord progression C | F | G | C we can do:

C2 G2 E3 G2 C2 G2 E3 G2 | F2 C3 A3 C3 F2 C3 A3 C3 | G2 D3 B3 D3 G2 D3 B3 D3 | C2 G2 E3 G2 C2 G2 E3 G2 |

For 7th chords, one can do the same thing but miss out the 5th note.

Also you could teach a twelve bar blues progression. Also you can look for chord progressions and cadences in classical piano pieces that he's learning, especially baroque, and relate this to his existing knowledge of chords.

Hope that helps