Jumping into my music journey began at a young age. I was 6 years old when I started playing piano. From there, I continued piano lessons for many years, started playing multiple instruments in concert and jazz band, ventured into community band, and more. Because of my vast experience in music, when it came time to create my musical growth plan, I wasn’t sure what route to go. I ended up deciding I wanted to try singing while playing piano for the first half of my growth plan. Up to the midterm I will be focussing on trying to sing a variety of songs while playing basic chords on the piano at the same time.

After creating my musical growth plan, the first thing I needed to do was find sheet music that I could use to learn the songs. A really good resource that I know of for sheet music is ultimate guitar tabs. This website provides chord charts for countless songs. This website is meant for guitars; however, I know that if you look at which fret the capo is supposed to be on, you can simply go up a half step for every fret in order to find your starting chord on the piano. For example, if a guitar song starts on the chord G and the capo is on fret 3, then you go to G on the piano and count up three half steps to find your starting note/chord. In this case it would be Bb! You can then repeat this process for each chord in song. Usually, songs only have about 4 chords so once you have transposed each chord in a song once, you have the chords for the entire song!

Because I know this technique, guitar tabs was a perfect resource for me to find basic sheet music for songs I wanted to learn. I decided to print off sheet music for drivers licence by Olivia Rodrigo, skinny love by Birdy, give me love by Ed Sheehan, and Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen to get me started. After printing off the music, it was time to get started learning and practicing!

When considering how to begin the process of singing while playing piano, I decided to begin with what I was least comfortable with. Because I have been playing piano for so long, I was not too concerned about this; however, singing is not as comfortable for me. I love to sing but I am not very confident with my singing. My dad and my sisters are all very talented singers so whenever I sing, I feel like people have high expectations for me. Everyone expects me to be good, so I get really nervous which makes me uncomfortable. As a result of this, I figured it would be a good idea to get comfortable with singing the songs alone first. That is mainly what I have been focussing on lately. In addition, I have already familiarized myself with the chords and am comfortable playing the songs so over the next few weeks I will begin putting the two together!

For now, here is a video of what I am currently working on. This is a very rough first attempt of me singing hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. Hope you enjoy!