Please, Can We Keep The Piano?

Here's a little quick back story proving an important point I want to make. We were moving into my old childhood house in Sweden, and the previous owners were in the middle of moving out their own things. One of those things was their black piano, an old piece of wood, metal and strings, with a dark and big sound. They were figuring out how to get it out through the door, or how they even managed to get it in in the first place. I asked my mom if we could keep it and my mom asked them if we could buy it instead, and they kindly just gave it to us. That old piano was the reason why I started loving music and writing my own melodies and themes and how I started to understand the possibilities of music.

I have never studied musical theory, never gotten a musical education or even been tutored for any instrument, and I still managed to be able to write massive orchestral pieces featuring full sections, soloists, and more, effortlessly on my computer with a sound quality good enough for Hollywood. I don’t want to say I’m particularly exceptional or have special talents that allowed me to do this. Rather, I simply love music, tried to understand what it was in the music from those Zelda games that I got goose bumps from, and finally found this awesome way of creating music on my computer.

I want to tell you that you can start creating your own musical compositions and songs on your computer, even if you’ve never had an education for music creation, or a big fancy studio. If I can do it - and a whole lot many others - you can too.

But then, do I need to be able to play the piano well?

It's a fair question! I think that you definitely do not need to be able to play the piano very well. What's important is that you are familiar with its keys and the corresponding notes, familiar with some very basic playing such as playing a melody with some simple triad chords, and that you understand somewhat of what the relationships of the notes are to be able to write harmony with your melodies and track structure.

As long as you have played some piano before, can follow along in the music theory section, and you're familiar with the piano key layout, you can compose soundtrack music – even demanding epic soundtrack music! You are simply and slowly using melodies and harmonies (chords) to build up the music, so there is no need to be an amazing piano player.

Later in the course I am going through the basic fundamentals of music theory, and having a piano to test this out on is very good.

(If you are interested in learning to play the piano more to be able to record your music more easily and become more familiar with pianos and keyboards, let me know and I can see if there is any interest for a specific course in that!)