The answer everybody knows but doesn’t want to hear is practice, practice, practice. It’s truly the only way to become better at playing your piano keys.
But, as a beatmaker, you should have a clear mindset on what you’re wanting to achieve out of your piano skills.
For example, if you’re practicing to become a classical pianist.. is that going to help you in producing catchy loops for your beats?
More discussed after the video:
If you want to improve your piano, you can take my free piano lessons.
But here’s my mindset while I’m practicing piano regarding beatmaking.
Practice your Piano for Beats, not Classical Piano
We as beatmakers create loops.
The catchier you can make these loops, and make them compliment each other, the better your productions will be!
I previously released a blog post showing how we as beatmakers should be practicing piano. It’s called Play Piano over Your Own Drum Loops.
Because if you think about it, as a beatmaker, all we do is create loops!
As I used to practice piano by hitting some keys, or playing to a metronome to keep in time, I realized something..
If I were to practice piano over top of a drum loop I’ve created, this would allow me to practice in a real-world setting! (It’s ideal!)
Just Cause you Make Beats, Doesn’t Mean you Practice Piano!
This is another important point. Just because you make lots of beats doesn’t mean you’re actually getting good practice time in with your piano keys.
Think about this, when we as beatmakers create our loops, we hit record, press play, wait for the metronome to count in (1, 2, 3, 4..) and then we play a quick loop hoping we nailed it as best we could.
We go in, quantize the notes, and edit other notes as necessary.
We repeat this process for any of the other loops we create, and then we move into the production process of arranging, mixing, or adding in our transitions.
But from this point on.. we are pretty much done playing the piano!
So really, you didn’t practice too much with your keys. You quickly recorded some MIDI data into your music program, which you went in later to fine-tune with your mouse.
This is why I recommend creating a drum loop for you to just play for 5-10 minutes so you can actually get a good amount of time in to practice.
If you do this every day, you’re skills and productions will rapidly increase!
Hope this one helps!