Playing the Piano for the Rest of Us...: How to play chord music on the piano. (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780990318293)

Victor Aramanda is the younger of identical twins. He was an air-force brat who grew up in the USA, Spain, Germany, Spain, and the USA in that order, was a parachute infantryman, was in full-time ministry for more than eight years, is a husband and father, taught many conferences, lead praise and worship, lived with his family in a missionary work in the UK and in the USA, has many skills and talents. How I started playing the piano... I began my experience with the piano by taking lessons in college from a great instructor. It turns out I was being taught how to play through classical training. I passed my course, but I hit a wall called "I read music like reading a foreign language I vaguely know." This killed any passion I had to play, I couldn't get over the wall. I stopped playing or even trying because I had lost hope in reading music fluently. I still loved music, it's as though my piano training was somehow put into hibernation. I sang in church sometimes and started to notice that the pages of music that we were using to sing from had the words to the songs on the paper and then a set of letters placed over the words every now and then. It turns out that the letters were all the musicians needed to know how to play the songs! I was told that the letters represented the series of "chords" that made up the songs. A few years later I was putting my classical piano training to use by trying figure out the chords to an easy worship song I wanted to play. A musician saw and heard me playing the song and gave me a tip on a simpler way to play that was outside of the classical training box I didn't realize I was stuck in. When I applied this small piece of instruction something broke inside me that use to say, "I can't play music because I can't read sheet music". That is when I began to grow and understand the actual concepts I have built into this course. It's as though God broke down the wall that stopped me from playing the piano for years in a matter of minutes! Now I hope to be able to share this with other people that want to play.