One of the best things today is that you can easily learn any instrument that you want. Seriously, there are plenty of YouTube tutorials, even for some obscure stuff. But despite such an abundance, it seems that the piano still remains one of the most popular instruments for beginners. Additionally, plenty of other musicians take up piano or any other keyboard-based stuff as their second instrument. So, today’s topic is color eyes learning.
In fact, according to various research conducted over the years, the piano takes the top spot when it comes to popularity. In America alone, an estimated 21 million people play the instrument. Now, if that isn’t impressive, we don’t know what is.
But at the same time, with so many people wanting to learn the instrument, you need to find suitable methods to teach them all. Overall, the piano is a great instrument because it has everything “laid out” in front of the player. That’s why it’s so often used by other instrumentalists as well.
Difficulties Learning Piano
However, if you’re an absolute beginner, you might find it to be a bit challenging. You have all the white keys and the black keys. This comes with its own set of difficulties. How are you supposed to finger a chord? What about all the scales, modes, and chord inversions. And things become super difficult when you start playing entire musical pieces.
The piano as we know it today is an old instrument. This comes with one major issue – plenty of learning methods are outdated. Plenty of teachers out there rely on some old methods that were established several decades ago.
In fact, despite the instrument’s popularity, many students get discouraged by these old and outdated ways. This not only includes some overly complicated exercises for beginners, which lead to the impatience of teachers and frustration of students. But they’re also using some old songs, like nursery rhymes, to teach you. Pretty discouraging, isn’t it?
Introducing the Solution: Color Eyes
These things are exactly why we here, over at Rock Out Loud, decided to come up with a new method for learning piano. Of course, we dedicate our time and effort to constantly evolve, with the main focus being our students’ results. It’s all about giving them the best possible ways to learn about their instruments and music in general.
For beginner pianists, a solution comes in form of our Color Eyes lessons. As the name suggests, it helps you learn piano through visual methods. It uses different colors to help you visualize and associate a musical note with a color.
The method comes in form of a metal tin box. Inside, there are seven crayons, each of different colors. We have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. These are the seven colors of the rainbow. And what makes it awesome is that you can memorize it as a catchy acronym – ROYGBIV.
As you may know, or as you’ll learn in your piano lessons, there are seven notes in a diatonic scale. For this purpose, we’ll take the C major scale, as it is represented with only the white keys on the keyboard.
Looking at the keyboard, it’s kind of hard to memorize all of the notes, even if it’s the white keys only. But there’s a visual pattern if you go from one C to the next C, one octave higher.
The Color Eyes method requires you to use a printed keyboard and paint each of the seven notes with a different color. And we’ll be using the same pattern as the “ROYGBIV” acronym goes. So the note C is red.
But here’s the main trick. You think of the color red while playing the C note on the piano. At the same time, it’s very important to sing it out loud. After that, you move up the scale and up the color pattern.
The next note is D and the next color is orange. You play the D note, sing it out loud, and think of the color orange. Every time you see orange, you think of the D note.
You already get the drift. Just move up the scale and up this color pattern. Play each note, think of the equivalent color, and, most importantly, sing it out loud.
This seemingly simple trick will help you train your ear. By associating each of these colors with a key on the keyboard, you’ll start learning the piano in a completely different way compared to the conventional methods.
The most important part here is that your brain is “connecting the dots.” You’re associating what you hear and what you’re playing. And this is exactly the proper way to set yourself to become a complete musician.
You Can Exercise Anywhere Using the Color Eyes Learning Method
The best thing about the Color Eyes method is that you can practice it anywhere. Just download any piano app and then think of any of the seven colors. Then try to sing the note and check whether you’ve guessed it right on the keyboard app. It’s a fun and simple way to practice becoming a great musician with a perfect, or almost perfect, sense of pitch.
But No Matter the Method, One Old Principle Still Remains…
Making an instrument easier to learn is great. This encourages beginner students, especially the youngest ones. But despite all the assisting methods, one old rule still applies – you need to practice.
No matter the musical style and your goals, every instrument requires hard work. These methods, like Rock Out Loud’s Color Eyes Learning, are there to make things easier, to assist you along the way.
Therefore – practice, practice, practice. There’s no tool out there that can learn instead of you or, somehow, magically, put knowledge in your head. It’s all about hard work. Color Eyes method is here just to help you out.
If you are ready to get down to some serious work, check out the Rock Out Loud piano lessons here.
