hello scannie,
...
I was looking for songs without many complicated chords and found these:
Spanish Eyes (Engelbert Humperdinck) and no more la Paloma (Elvis Presley).
Good choice -especially No More (La Paloma), which really goes into ear, can be payed in many ways and can be basically played by using only two chords.
- How do I find the melody, by ear or a notation?
You simply need to know the melody of the song (at least the main melody) -that's why you decided for it in first place. Can you sing, whistle or hum the melody? If yes, then that's enough. If you can't, then pick another song.
An educated/professional musician can probably guess the melody just by looking at music notations, but that's usually not how we amateurs do -instead, we have certain melody in our head and we try to replicate that. When we're stuck at certain part of melody, we listen the song again (many times) and try to remember problematic part of the song... and we try to play it again and again.
So far, only our hearing and sense for music is enough. But sooner or later, it will happen that certain parts of the song are not that clear to us and we're not sure which keys to press. At this point ability to read musical notes is essential and is something that we just need to learn -at least at basic level.
Should this be a notation written for an arranger keyboard?
Notation is never written especially for arranger keyboard. Notation (for main melody) can be for any instrument (piano, trumpet, violin, etc.) -it's up to you to decide which voice you will use for main melody.
- How do I find the corresponding chords? I see that there is software that shows the chords from a song (Chordify and Ultimate Guitar).
If we learn to play the song "by ear", then it's up to us to decide in what key we will play the song. We usually decide for C-maj key, simply because it's the easiest to play. In this case it's enough to know C-maj (obviously), F-maj and G-maj chord -and by knowing only these three chords we can play almost any pop song we wish.
If we decide to use music sheets, then we're practically forced to use the chords that are specified in notation. As we become more experienced with musical notation, we will be able to transpose notation to our wish, but that can be confusing and is usually avoided.
Chordify can be very helpful... but only if we have at least basic skills, which includes the ability to play a song by ear.
- And how do I find the corresponding style?
By ear! Style is just a rhythm and what you're looking for, is a rhythm that suit your song. Many times we can find more than only one style for the song that we wish to play and in this case we simply decide for the style which
sounds the best in our personal opinion -it's as simple as that.
For example, for No more/La Paloma song you can use Rumba or Beguine style (both in Ballroom section in SX700).
I don't want to sound rude or discourage you.. but there's one thing that you should think about: playing music is not for everyone -no matter what instrument we use.
Why am I saying that? Because I have an impression that you didn't make much progress in last several months. There are thousands of videos showing keyboard playing and lessons explaining chords, etc., which seems to be of no help for you.
Some have suggested a professional teacher... But what I think would be better is, that you just find someone who can play keyboard good enough and that he shows you the basics. He probably won't teach you how to play music, but he for sure can show you "where to start and how to do it" -and a cup of coffee or a beer will suffice
Bogdan