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What's the best way to learn piano without an in-person teacher?
I recently bought a keyboard and am going to dedicate 30 minutes a day to practicing piano. My goal is to be able to play my favorite songs (jazz & indie mainly), improvise, and generally be competent.
I also want to learn how to sightread, so I've been using https://sightreading.training which has been really useful! I have a background in music (guitar, mostly) and know music theory as well.
Unfortunately due to COVID, Delta, etc, I am not really interested in in-person lessons at the moment, so I was wondering if any tilde users had advice about learning to play through resources online or books!
I'm also really interested in any tips that anyone may have!
This is a difficult thing to ponder as someone who's had a lot of piano training in the past... it's hard to visualize the beginner's mind when you have expertise. So I'll keep this somewhat generic.
On technique
One of the more important things a teacher does for you, as a beginner, is help you to spot technique errors you are making and correct them before they become ingrained muscle memory, after which they're much harder (but not impossible) to correct. As a beginner, you will have a hard time distinguishing between a physical gesture that feels awkward because it's unfamiliar to you, and one that feels awkward because it is awkward (and therefore will impede your fluid playing in the future).
Try to be vigilant in separating those two different root causes. To that end, when learning a new technique, start slowly--slower than you think--and make sure you find a way to execute it that feels fluid, and there's a certain elegance and "conservation of energy" in the way you perform it. Now, this may or may not be 100% identical to someone you see doing the same technique on YouTube; we all have differently shaped hands and flexibility. Once you've got it down slowly, you can start to gradually speed it up. Any time you find yourself encountering fumbling, or more importantly, pain of any sort, take a break, slow it down, don't try to push through. Repetitive stress injuries in piano can sneak up on you, especially if you start trying to excessively drill.
On reproduction vs. improvisation
I would say there's two separate skills in playing an instrument. On the one hand, you can get increasingly good at reproducing a piece exactly. This involves being able to read sheet music and perform it accurately, and then moving up the difficulty ladder in being able to perform increasingly difficult pieces (faster, more challenging chords, more difficult techniques) accurately. The trick to advancing rapidly on this axis is finding pieces that exercise some boundary of your abilities: they should be hard in one technique or area you're trying to improve, but within your skills elsewhere. Picking a piece that's completely beyond you in all areas is a recipe for much slower progression and frustration. Shout-out to IMSLP as an invaluable tool for finding pieces. I would also place programs like "Synthesia" into this category, as they reward you on precise reproduction of a recorded piece.
Alternatively, the improvisational skill lies in being able to take a very broad outline of a piece (e.g., a jazz lead sheet is essentially a chord progression and the main melodic line) and transform it into a novel musical work on-the-fly. This is less about practicing technique, and more about building up a compositional toolkit--chords and riffs--and embedding those tools into your immediate recollection so you can summon them effortlessly as you play. What's nice about this is that you can often take the same song and play it throughout your progression; as you get better, you improvise more complexity over the same basic outline. Advancing on this axis means learning and practicing scales and chords: can you take a piece you know and play it in all 12 different keys? Further evolution can involve transcription: when you're listening to a piece and you hear that something that's super cool, can you figure out how to play it yourself, by ear? Once you've figured out how to play it literally, you can experiment with it in different contexts and eventually assimilate the basic idea into your improvisational toolkit.
I would say the easiest way to start down this path is to find songs you like on a tabs site (e.g. ultimate-guitar) and find a chords+lyrics document. Then, learn how to play those chords elsewhere. There's nigh-infinite ways to transform a chord, but the basic triads and inversions are straightforward; you might simplify a scary looking chord like "Cadd9" into just "C" for now. It'll sound a bit off, but in the ballpark, and as you get more comfortable, you can start expanding from triads into the more complex chord types.
Note: while obviously the concert vs. jazz pianist might arguably specialize in these two different axes, all musicians will have some facility on both ladders and you should probably not disregard one or the other.
On motivation
Regardless of whether you have a teacher or not, I think motivation is the crucial driver of progress. Why do you want to get better? Is it achievement-for-the-sake-of-achievement? Do you just want to impress people with your skills? That's often a recipe for frustration. Another misstep is to play a piece solely as a skill-builder when, in reality, you just aren't that into it as music. Instead, in my practice, I find the key is to seeking out stuff that really make you go "heck yeah, I want to play that!" Maybe you have to find simplified sheet music at first, or just find the chord progression and play it with your own level of ability, but the reward of being able to generate a "heck yeah!" out of your own playing is, in my mind, one of the biggest drivers towards musical progress. Find something you like to play, learn to play it, repeat. :)
One thing that's easy to miss: teachers can help you contextualize your goals and successes.
Sometimes you get hung up on challenges. You wrestle them what seems like forever until you overcome them, but afterwards all you remember is how hard you worked. You can lose sight of what you accomplished — it had a purpose!
Part of what a teacher is for is to give you feedback even when it seems like you're not making progress.
You can get some of that without a teacher, though. You can celebrate small things by showing off 10 seconds to your friend, or by recording 10 seconds and listening back to it yourself.
@tvl, the biggest advice I think I'd give is: let yourself be the four-year-old proudly showing off your painting; and also let yourself be the proud parent who puts it up on the refrigerator. The more little paintings you make, the faster they'll improve!
There are a lot of online resources out there for piano, many of them free, which I haven’t used so I can’t give specific advice. But if you’re willing to spend money then I suggest finding an online teacher that you can talk to over video chat. This would be especially true for an absolute beginner where you are working on basic things like rhythm, fingering, how to think about music, how to read sheet music, and have I mentioned rhythm?
One thing you should be getting from them is advice about what to work on. To some extent this is up to you but they might also have a preferred way of teaching and you will have to decide if you like it.
Knowing how to play an instrument well is a combination of many different skills and to some extent you can learn them in different orders. For example, learning to read sheet music right away is traditional but it’s actually optional and there are some courses for kids that put it off for a few years. But then you will need to work on picking up music by ear and memorization. You would also need a teacher who is comfortable teaching that way.
I’m personally self-taught on accordion but that’s after years of fairly traditional piano lessons as a kid. I’m not sure if they were the greatest of teachers but it gave me a foundation of basic musical knowledge that I can draw on when learning a different instrument. (Though I tend to focus on sheet music a bit more than I’d like.)
My approach to improvisation is (1) learn a song really well. Have it memorized and be able to play it without trying too hard. It doesn’t need to be a difficult song. (2) get bored and start messing with it.
Very interested in this as well. My piano is arriving on Monday! I was able to acquire a used Yamaha P-35B for a decent price. What are you playing on? My background is playing trumpet/french horn for 8 years during middle/high school. I don't know how much that knowledge will help me with learning piano but this is something I have wanted to try to learn since I was a kid.
I bought a copy of Synthesia although I have heard that this resource alone will likely not be enough. I'm looking for Youtube series and books to be my main learning vehicle while using synthesia to practice rhythm and learn random songs.
Nice! Mine is a Casiotone CT-S1, a really cheap keyboard. Figured I would invest small, then sell it and upgrade if it sticks :)
Very cool looking keyboard and it looks like it is an awesome value!
Feel free to message me if you wanna talk about progress and stuff. Would be interested to hear what works and what doesn't work as you are learning!
This is a huge cop-out for me because I have spent much time and money on this and have had little success due to lack of time and concentration.
The “traditional” choice is Alfred’s adult piano workbooks. It will teach you piano in a traditional way, and has assignments that you will write in your workbook to help you memorize the fundamentals. It works great for some people, but others might find it painful and give up. If you don’t practice it regularly you will forget everything and have to start over again.
A somewhat better option I have found is Piano For All, an ebook series that you can purchase for arguably too much money. It’s a rich media textbook, containing illustrations, photos, music, and videos. The emphasis with this program is on Jazz piano, which is to say that you learn by doing. I had much better luck when I tried it.
If you’ve got a digital piano and a way to hook it up to a Mac or iPad, garageband actually has completely free interactive piano lessons. It’s just woefully incomplete; you might learn how to play a few songs, but you won’t know how to do much else.
On the other hand, if you find you had a lot of success with the garageband method, there are other paid options that you can use to have similar styled interactive lessons. They tend to be pretty expensive, though, and I don’t know how good the lessons are.
One notable bit is that the only of these options that don’t have any form of DRM is Alfred’s, from the sole reason of it being a dead tree book.
I don't know how to play piano, so take this with a grain of salt, but Drumeo.com is the go-to recommendation for learning the drums solo/online and they have a sister site called Pianote that might be worth checking out. I can vouch for the quality of Drumeo though, and I would assume their sister site for the pianofolk is comparable.