After a while it will get easy! Then pick the easiest chord progression you know and transpose it into F#.
Simply spend 15-20 minutes spinning out basic melodies in F# until you could do it in your sleep. Improvising simple melodies in the key will also give you fluency. “Happy Birthday.” Easy melodies that you already know well. You’ll want to start playing some VERY EASY music in the new key.
(You’ll still have to practice it, but it won’t be quite as painful.)Īt this point you may be asking, “Well, how do I get fluent in F# without working on that Bach piece or transposing my jazz chord voicings to that key?” The answer is easier than you might guess, and will seem obvious after you’ve done it for a while. After you attain that, the “hard stuff” will come to you much more readily. You’ll want to “hang out” in the new key until you start thinking in it. The “key” (sorry about the pun!) is to aim for fluency, not mastery right away. Sure, we learn the notes in the scale, but this usually doesn’t help us much when we attempt to play that Bach fugue in F#, or, even worse, try to improvise a bebop blues in the same key. The usual procedure of obligatorily playing the F# major scale up and down the keyboard may be a good place to start, but it’s doesn’t quite do the trick. What we need is an effective (and enjoyable) strategy for learning these keys. And when we do try to play with all those sharps or flats, we find it so mentally painful to do that we tend to get discouraged and give up before it ever becomes easy. Not many of us encounter keys like F# until we get to Bach fugues or Chopin etudes. The vast majority of piano music is in the “easy” keys and that’s what we grow up playing. If you can play piano easily in “white note” keys like C, F, and G, but find keys with lots of sharps or flats like F#, Db, and B to be too difficult, be assured that you’re not alone.
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