Piano for Vocalists - Introduction

This series of posts is intended for the vocalist who wants to acquire more skills at the piano, but may not currently have the means or access to piano lessons. The tips and techniques discussed in these posts should not be taken as a piano curriculum. They are specifically focused on giving the vocalist the skills they need to use the piano most effectively as a singer. While the best attempt at providing good piano technique will and should always be made, these posts are no substitute for actual lessons with a good piano teacher.

To be an effective vocalist one must possess at least basic keyboard skills. I began my musical career as a violinist. There was a piano in my home growing up and one got used in my lessons, but I did not know very much about it at all. At some point my middle school orchestra teacher taught me where A440 was so that I could help him tune. From there I eventually figured out the rest of the keys and their corresponding written notes. By the time I joined choir in high school I was able to pick out pitches and melodies with relative ease, which proved incredibly useful for practicing my vocal music.

As I got deeper into my musical studies and went to college I began to see the truth behind some of the stereotypes about vocalists not knowing how to read music or having any instrumental knowledge. The worst part is the arrogance that so many vocalists have about this lack of knowledge. Many of them are in fact proud of their ignorance. They don’t seem to realize that they are severely limiting themselves.

This series of posts is intended for the vocalist who wants to acquire more skills at the piano, but may not currently have the means or access to piano lessons. The tips and techniques discussed in these posts should not be taken as a piano curriculum. They are specifically focused on giving the vocalist the skills they need to use the piano most effectively as a singer. While the best attempt at providing good piano technique will and should always be made, these posts are no substitute for actual lessons with a good piano teacher. With that disclaimer out of the way let’s get into it.

Reading music is essential to this process. The ideal scenario would be to gain a working knowledge of both the treble and bass clefs, regardless of your own voice part. Doing so will allow you to have a more thorough understanding of your part in the context of the accompaniment in the case of solo literature, as well as the other parts in ensemble pieces.

There are countless sources for learning to read the clefs. Find as many tricks as possible because the more ways that the information is presented, the more chance for retention there is. One classic way is the use of pneumonic sayings. “Every Good Boy Does Fine” is a standard for the lines of the treble clef. The spaces spell FACE, which rhymes. The bass clef uses “Good Boys Do Fine Always” for the lines and “All Cows Eat Grass” for the spaces. There are countless other sayings that are commonly used, or you can make up your own. Just having one to help is good.

It is also crucial to memorize what notes correspond to which keys on the piano. This is admittedly easier than learning the staves because of the repeated pattern of black and white keys.

There are not too many tricks here outside of simple memorization. Using the different groups of black keys is the easiest way to get the key names down. The notes around the two black keys are C, D, and E, while F, G, A, and B are clustered with the groups of three. All white keys are natural notes, while the black keys provide sharps and/or flats depending on the key and the context. Knowledge of the enharmonic notes of each key will be useful later on when dealing with keys with lots of accidentals.

Constantly keep your posture in mind at the piano. While you may not be playing hours a day like a concert pianist you can still injure yourself if playing with improper technique. Remember that the muscles that power your arms go into the back, so keep an awareness of that. Slouching will cut off the connection to these muscles, and make your arms work harder, but sitting up too much can cause the back to cave in and the shoulders to tighten causing the same cutoff. Keep the posture you have for singing while at the piano and you should be good. The fingers should be curved as though draped over a large orange. Think of dropping into the keys with the weight of the arm rather than pushing them down with the fingers. If you are going to take even one piano lesson, this would be the thing to do it for.

Speaking of the fingers, each one is assigned a number.

This allows us to read the fingering printed in our music or add our own to help us play any passage. Fingering is very similar to the solfege syllables vocalists use. The hands mirror each other, which means the numbers stay the same. This means that if we play 1 2 3 4 5 with both hands they will be moving in contrary motion; the right ascending, the left descending. Assuming our hands are an octave apart we would be playing this:

If we want to play a parallel line we have to change one hand’s fingering:

Knowing the fingerings is essential. Practice Figure 5 simply to work the motion of playing. Then do Figure 6 to get used to the hands playing different fingers at once.

The final step to take before you really start playing is to put together what keys go with which notes on the grand staff. Middle C is a note you hear so much about, both because of its position in the middle of the keyboard and its position in the middle of the grand staff. This is an excellent landmark to use. From there start with the notes in your range, stepping up for female singers, and down for male singers. Get a handle on consistently identifying and playing the notes that you sing the most before you move on to the rest of the keyboard. Keeping your ear involved here is always good too – it can tell you if you’re reading the wrong octave as long as you pay attention.

This is the foundation of getting any vocalist’s piano skills to a functional level and should be done before any other steps are taken. Trying to learn this while also attempting the techniques described in the rest of this series could make it all more complicated. Once the skills described here are solid the next posts can be explored. The exercises in the next three posts (Five Finger Patterns, Melody, and Harmony) should be done together, because they are three very important aspects of piano technique. Rotate between the exercises, paying attention to which come more naturally to you and how the skills you work in each transfer and interact with the others.

[i] https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/23561/numbers-above-notes-in-piano-sheet-music/23562