I'd really like to hear from other keyboard teachers who do peri work in schools, as this is the bulk of my work (I have around 30 pupils at primary and 20 at secondary level, who have individual or paired lessons for 15 or 20 mins a week during school time.), and I don't actually know anyone else who does this, so have no one to bounce ideas off. I'm fairly sure I'm doing the right thing as I have over 10 years experience at this now, and more than half of the pupils stay with me until the end of their time at that school, several taking London College exams successfully. These are typical things that I do:

I start them on the "Progressive Keyboard" series, the pink young beginner one for primary pupils and the big white one for secondary pupils. Most pupils who do the young beginner series will work through Books 1 and 2 and some of the supplementary songbook. I don't like book 3 much but do use it for some pupils. I supplement this with several aural tunes, eg. "Heart and Soul" "Frere Jacques" "Hot cross buns" etc.
I also use the "Red Hot Recorder" and "Razzmajazz Recorder" books, for experience of playing along with the backing tracks, and getting them to move out of C position.
I introduce "hands together" playing after a few weeks, sometimes much longer depending on age and ability of the pupil. They will start with single-finger chords, and depending on their ability and hand size we will then move on to 3 finger chords. By this stage they may be getting towards Step 1 level, when I will introduce pieces from the LCM Key Tutor which contains the material for Steps 1 and 2, and they may decide to take one or both of these exams when they are ready. I find Step 2 quite a bit harder than 1 as there are changes of hand position and some awkward chords, also I don't like the pieces much. For able pupils I will go straight onto Grade 1, or, now the LCM have introduced the Performance Awawd DVD's, I'm veering more towards them.
I also do a number of my own arrangements, as there is such a shortage of keyboard books out there. Current pop songs and TV themes, and as one of my primary schools is Catholic and I'm also the pianist there, the hymns/songs they sing in their singing classes.
I find that by the end of their primary years the more able pupils are around Grade 2 level. I haven't been working so long at the secondary school, so haven't taken anyone right through from Year 7 yet.

I'd like to know from other teachers: What technical stuff do you do? I touch on scales but don't do them a lot unless they're preparing for an exam. Do you do rhythm exercises - I know this is something I need to do more of.
How do you use the short time successfully? Obviously progress is going to be slower than for my private pupils, who I see for at least half an hour a week individually.
And what do you do with the less able pupils? I have a few who can't seem to play hands together, not even a simple C to G alternation in the left hand, and it's about the limits of their ability just to remember the letter names of the notes. They also never seem to practise, yet they keep coming to lessons for 3 years and more, it's hard to think how to push them forward.

I stopped peri work about a year ago but prior to that I taught keyboard as a peri for many years. Like you I taught individual and paired lessons. I ended up devising my own tutor book on my notation software as I never found a book that I was completely happy with. I liked the tunes in the Progressive series but didn't use the books because they had all the note names written in. I inherited a number of keyboard students in secondary school using this book and they could barely read a note.

I think you are very wise to teach some tunes aurally, and to introduce plenty of popular songs. One that went down well with my students was Spongebob Squarepants - it has repetitive patterns based around the pentatonic scale and was easy to teach aurally.

I did very little technical stuff really - just plenty of drills to get pupils used to the keyboard geography relating to the piece they were learning. It's such a different feel from working on a weighted keyboard and like you I tended to stay away from scales unless preparing for exams.

With fingered chords I nearly always found F a problem in the early stages. In the end I encouraged older students to memorise C and G first, then I bought in D7 and linked that to an easy 5-finger piece in G and got them to play it hands together. It seemed to work far better than bringing in F at an early stage.

For less able pupils I worked on improvisation. They enjoyed doing the dorian mode on D while I played Dm and C chords underneath in either 4/4 or 6/8. I also found less able pupils sometimes enjoyed making up their own tunes in the C 5-finger position while playing C and G chords underneath. By not having to worry about playing the 'right' notes they could listen properly to the sounds they were making.

I used TG for exams because I liked the material but I've heard good things about LCM. In primary school the highest level exam they took was usually Grade 2 and that could easily take 3-4 years. With 20-minute lessons and sometimes little interaction with parents, there is a limit to what you can achieve.

Hope others contribute to this thread - EKB tuition is such a potentially creative area and although I'm doing little tuition in it at present it's good to share ideas.

When I teach the keyboard I always use single-finger chords until they are quite fluent with the idea. I've heard it suggested that they're not "the real thing" or that they're cheating or just a shortcut.
If you'd said that to my Dad smoke would have started coming out of his ears. He was a very good piano accordion player (among other instruments) and those instruments have used single-finger chords for, presumably, as long as they've been in existence, which is a LOT longer than these keyboards, or even you and me.

Why are people teaching fingered chords to beginners?

My ?150 Yamaha is intuitive enough to read single-finger and also the fingered chords needed for slightly more sophisticated harmony. I show pupils what a C chord consists of, but then say you can get the same major chord by using just the one key. Since it's quite necessary if you're playing with auto accompaniment to just tap and release, single finger chords are safer for the beginner who otherwise holds on to the key until after he's pressed the next one and ended up with something he didn't mean.

I suspect most teachers will start with single fingered chords in the first few lessons, but I've found that most students of 8 and a half years upwards take to fingered chords prettily easily if they are introduced as a normal part of learning keyboard. I'm pretty sure fingered chords are mandatory for some exam boards, and to allow a pupil to use single finger chords for too long might result in their getting a nasty shock when they have to change over. Also 7ths or minor chords could cause confusion as the way the keyboard produces these is artificial and the notes used are different to the actual notes in the chord.

I'm not saying this is the 'right' or 'only' way to proceed and the abilities of the student need to be taken into account. Of course there will be some students who genuinely struggle with fingered chords, and those cases I have permitted sfcs rather than have them give up.

I use single-finger chords almost all the time unless I actually want something out of the ordinary, and I studied keyboard harmony to degree level! . To have to learn a separate set of notes for every major, minor, seventh and minor seventh chord is a lot of learning to do. We don't ask it of pianists until about grade 5, but with single finger chords you can play Bm7 straight away. I think it's bizarre that the examining boards ask for fingered chords in the lower grades. For the four "usual" chord types, it's unnecessary work. And it teaches people that a C chord is in second inversion, if most of the keyboard books I've seen are anything to go by.

Thanks for replies so far, would love to hear some more
I teach fingered chords because a) they are required in exams even from Step 1 level, and b) single finger chords apart from the basic major ones, vary depending if your keyboard is Yamaha, Casio or another make. But I don't teach them to the least able pupils or anyone who appears to be struggling.

Apologies for butting in as not a teacher of keyboard but why not teach fingered chords?
Isn't automatically teaching single fingered assuming or acknowledging that keyboard students really don't want to bother learning about all that music stuff?

I play piano accordion and took electronic keyboard to grade 5 (always using fully fingered chords), although I only teach piano (so the following isn't professional advice or anything!)

With piano accordion, the chords in the left hand are laid out very logically in accordance with the circle of 5th. Playing a G minor chord, for example, means pressing the button that is in the 'G' row and the 'minor' column. However playing a 'single-fingered' G minor chord on an electronic keyboard might involve, say pressing the keys 'G' and 'A' together (sorry I can't remember exactly what keys you press), even though 'A' is not in the chord of G minor.

I should think it would be best to use fully-fingered chords from early on so that the pupil can learn more about what these chords 'mean' and maybe even learn how to harmonize the right-hand melody using notes from the current chord. You don't have to learn the "notes for every major, minor, seventh and minor seventh chord" right away: Just the tonic, subdominant, dominant and dominant 7th chords in a few keys would be enough initially I guess. If you're concerned about using random inversions for different chords, then you could: always play the tonic chord in root position (and teach how to construct this either from the pentascale or using semitones), and then the subdominant chord in 2nd position and the dominant chord in 1st position. (although probably not using all that complicated terminology!) This might help with the concept of playing in different keys too.

So I'd say that the comparison between Electronic Keyboard and Piano Accordion is unfair - there is no conflict with musical theory with 'single finger' chords on Accordion! You still use fully-fingered chords in the right-hand too on both instruments.

Sorry for going a bit by the way!

So would you also advocate teaching an elementary guitar player (of the folk rather than the classical persuasion) to know which notes are in every chord before they learn them as finger positions?

I think to consider G minor as G+A (that's the Casio formation; on a Yamaha and I suspect many others, it's G + any black to the left) is the wrong wy to think of it. i only ever mention the root note when teaching single-finger chords, and the others are black to the left, white to the left, and both. Or on a Casio, +1, +2 and +3 to the right. The letter names of the notes don't enter into it, they're positions, just as they are on a guitar, I tell my pupils that their left hand is behaving slightly like a guitarit's now and not a pianist's, and I've never had anyone mention the names of any of the "extra" notes.

I think the fact that you still have to make fingered chords with your right hand on the accordion (or in my Dad's case, since he was left-handed and played upside down, the left hand - do many people do this? Was he the Paul McCartney of the accordion?) is spurious - you can still do that with the keyboard, and I most certainly do. But I find it so much quicker, if I've wandered into, say, B minor, to think I just need B minor and F#7 in the left here. Why do more work there than you need to, unless you're a cold-showers-and-rough-towels addict?

But in a way all this is beside the point. My experience with beginners is that they have enough trouble coordinating hands and chords without adding the unnecessary fingering in the early stage. Teaching them the fingered chords from the start just because they will then understand how the harmony is made up is like teaching about subordinate clauses to those who are learning to read.

One of my piano teachers who was very handy on the keyboard and also taught it used to start keyboard players off with a piano tutor.
That way they were reading both clefs and using both hands before adding the extra notes to make chords.
I wouldn't necessarily expect the harmony to be understood that well in the beginning stages of using fingered chords. I think that would come a little later for most?

Sorry it has taken so long for me to reply - busy couple of weeks!

Thanks for that post which gave me food for thought, but I must disagree with many of your analogies.


I'm not a guitar player, never mind a guitar teacher, but I don't think I'd advocate teaching which notes are in every chord for an elementary folk guitarists.

First of all, folk guitar and 'general' electronic keyboard (encompassing pop, classical, folk etc) are very different instruments. I would argue that it would be more difficult to teach pupils how to construct chords on guitar than on keyboard, as with the guitar, you have the additional logistical conundrum of making sure that each note in the chord is played by at least one of the 6 strings (with minor exceptions, such as 7th chords might not need to contain the 5th, and jazz chords in a jazz context might not need to contain the root). However with keyboard, it is easier as, in the beginning stages, each note in the chord is played exactly once (again maybe missing out the 5th in 7th chords) and it is possible to play the chords using the same hands shapes with the notes of the chord in the same order whatever the key you're playing in. You could still teach the chords using just one octave initially and then do the explaning about the chords later. I think this later explanation would come easier if they already knew what notes were in each of the chords they had learnt.

So with folk guitar it is probably best just to learn the chord shapes to start off with. With classical guitar I would think knowing the notes in chords would be important!



Even if you did think of it this way, you're still consciously playing notes that aren't in the chords which I would have thought would cause complications when learning about harmonisation later.

Just another thing I've thought off - if a pupil performed on a different keyboard (e.g. at a concert where they didn't have their own keyboard with them) and this keyboard used the other single-finger chord system than the one that they were used to, wouldn't this cause problems?



But the 'positions' on a guitar use the correct notes of the chord. Single finger chords on keyboard, in general, don't!



Yep I understand that you can still do it on keyboard, but I think that learning single-finger chords on keyboard could impede learning about RH (and indeed LH) harmonisation later on, whereas LH chords on accordion wouldn't. I think that "more work" is justified here because of its aid in understanding and playing harmony.

I certainly like my showers hot and my towels soft! And learning about fully-fingered chords is not like having cold showers! Pianists do it for a start - they don't learn single fingered chords and they get on alright! (although granted that pianists would generally learn about chords later than keyboard players - but keyboard players don't, in the early stages, have to worry about anything more than chords in the LH, so I think that learning fully-fingered chords for keyboardists would not be too much work.)

I can't answer with certainty your question about left handed accordionists, but I should think that most of them would learn using the 'normal' orientation: with the piano-keyboard on the right-hand side. Although there's probably plenty of LHed people like your dad who play the accordion perfectly well when turned upside-down!



Fair enough and I respect your opinion as a keyboard teacher. I wouldn't have thought that learning 3 fully-fingered chords initially, and then adding more one at a time as learning goes on, would have been that much extra effort though.

Interesting debate here certainly thanks for your input!