Don't Stop Man!

Everyone has their own personal choice of how they express themselves musically. Some choose to play drums, some choose to flaunt their vocal talent, some just like to listen to it and leave it to other people to make it up for them. Personally, one of my favorite ways to express myself musically is by playing piano. Even if I haven't taken a piano lesson since I was in the fourth grade, playing the piano is so much fun. There's something about being able to play, at the very least, semi-difficult melodies and harmonies up and down the eighty-eights, combining an amalgamation of chords, singular notes and octaves that touches the heart and calms the mind.
I think most musicians would agree with me when I say it gives you a sense of pride to be able to play any instrument regardless of what it is and having an extra skill that you can call your own. I mean how many people can brag about being able to play "Devil Went Down to Georgia" on violin or "Classical Gas" on guitar? While I can't do either of these (although I'm working on the latter of the two), I can play some fairly interesting songs on the piano despite having a lack of training in the instrument.
The two most recent songs that I've been working on a lot are both songs I think a vast majority of people have heard and are quite familiar with whether they know it or not. The first one is called "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey. Yes, that's right I can play perhaps one of the most famous songs from the golden age of music on piano. The only really tricky part of this song is keeping different rhythms all at the same time. For instance, higher part of it, the chords, are essentially just straight eighth notes with a two-note chord/single note alternation. The underlying part is the moving bassline in the lower ranges of the keyboard, quite simple to play once the former becomes muscle memory. To add even further difficulty, if you're singing along with it, the entire piano part pretty much has to be entirely muscle memory, or at the very least mostly muscle memory.
The second song I've been working on is called "Piano Man" by Billy Joel. This one may not be as well known, but it's definitely one of those "I'd know it if I heard it" songs if you don't remember song titles that well. The only thing that really makes this song hard is that it has a lot of chord changes. Not terribly hard chord changes, but quite a few. The other thing that can make this song a little challenging is certain phrases that can easily be thrown out of time if done incorrectly. A lot of it is actually basic music fundamentals as easy as just feeling the beat, but this becomes almost critical when playing piano as you really have to feel where the beat is to play certain songs such as this one.
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