Good Beatles piano songs to learn? | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I once owned a good book called ‘The Beatles Complete’ with quite authentic guitar chords. I was sure there was a piano version of the same so yesterday I searched for it and came across this post on Google. I thought I might share something with you.

I’m a bass player predominantly but a while ago I bought myself a digital piano and jumped in at the deep end. I wasn’t satisfied with just learning a few chords and, foolishly or not, I decided to learn something complex – something to sink my teeth into. The piece I chose was ‘Cavatina’ by Stanley Myers, It was originally written for piano but was made famous by John Williams on guitar as the theme for the movie ‘The Deer Hunter’.

Now, I certainly wasn’t in any way a pianist and in fact I was a complete novice but my theory was that all I had to do would be to learn small sections one after the other, in other words – a bar or two at a time, commit that to memory and move to the next passage etc. etc. The trouble was I can’t read the grand clef (traditional sheet music) and I wasn’t prepared to learn. I turned to Youtube tutorials and found an excellent one by Annemie van Riel. In a split screen was her hands playing the piece along with the keys being highlighted as they were played. That’s fine but a very impractical way to learn the piece. Rewinding, trying to look at two things at once (my keyboard and the video) and so on.

Stay with me here.

I realised I had to simplify the methodology if I was going to keep my sanity so I developed my own chart system using Annemie’s video as the basis for the chart. I transposed each note or chord to a virtual keyboard in Publisher with numbered dots. The dots were coloured dark for the left hand and light for the right. The dots were numbered for the sequence in which each key is pressed. OK, this might not seem simple to you but I’m a graphic designer and it was easy enough and quick enough to complete the score in a few hours. And – blow me down – within a relatively short period I learned ‘Cavatina’ to a pretty damn good standard. It’s 4.30 mins of tricky piano. It was all head memory and muscle memory and I have no idea what chords I’m playing but there you go.

The point of all this is that now I use the same method for all the songs I learn on piano. That includes several Beatles songs. I had to learn ‘Hey Jude ‘ for a small concert. I was confident I could do it because it is a fairly simple piece and with my Join-The-Dots method I learned it quickly. I’ve done a complex arrangement (from Youtube) of ‘If I Fell ‘ with the melody over arpeggios. Really nice to play. But I’ve also started work on ‘Here, There And Everywhere ‘, ‘It’s Only Love ‘, ‘Lucy’ and ‘Dear Prudence ‘.

What I was looking for yesterday was some more Beatles to add to my repertoire. I would probably just do chords on the beat but I would use the same dot method.

The thing about these charts is that they can be printed out and used as reference for the repertoire when you need to brush up on songs. Much more practical than other methods I think.

So if anyone is interested I can make available Beatles songs I have completed and I can work on others by request. No promises.

This is my first post here and I’ll wait for admin approval and any interest from you guys and then I’ll post a screen shot of a Join-The-Dots chart so you know what the hell I’m talking about.

Sorry for the long post. I thought you might need some convincing. And I’m a Beatles nut. One of the great joys was bringing home a new Beatles album. You know what I mean.

Thanks for the welcome.

This is the intro to ‘Cavatina’. It’s a simple arpeggio and will give you a good idea of how the system works.

The dark dots are the left hand obviously. Play the keys in the numbered sequence. (If you were playing a chord the numbers would all be the same as you would hit the keys simultaneously.)

This method doesn’t indicate which fingers to use or timing. That’s up to the user!

More later….