If you are a complete beginner to piano and have hardly even played a note yet, then something you should learn first is a 12 Bar Blues Progression. It is something that I teach all my beginner students and it is proven very popular with my students. There are also plenty of really good video tutorials available online that will show you how to play a simple 12 bar blues sequence.
One of the reasons that it is good to learn the 12 bar blues is because you can use it in a variety of different ways, and lots of songs originate from the blues!
Elvis Presley is one famous example of how his simple and effective tunes are mainly formed from a 12 bar blues chord progressions - Hound Dog and Blue Suede Shoes are two of his more famous songs that feature a 12 bar blues sequence.
As a beginner all that most people really want to be able to do to begin with is to be able to play a song, and with the 12 Bar blues, it incorporates chords which are frequent in any song along with a simple bass line. By playing this it has you playing your hands together using chords in your right hand and individual bass notes in your left.
This really helps you get to grips with learning the coordination of your hands together and forces you to get used to the distance between bass notes and higher notes. It gets you moving between various chords, so you learn how to play smooth transitions as a beginner which is important to learn. You will be slow to pick this up initially but if you are prepared to spend a few days practicing this technique you will be rocking and rolling in no time at all.
12 Bar blues is a really good piece to learn, and once you have mastered the simple 12 bar blues you can put a lot more into it, and make it sound different by changing the bass line, switching the chords around or adding some soloing into the piece by using blues scales, and if you were to go on and play in a band, this would really come in handy as you would be used to playing chords.
Other styles of music, particularly rock songs can also have a blues influence or are based in the 12 bar blues sequence.
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