How to Learn Piano with Technology | Hacker News Reader

How to Learn Piano with Technology

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147 pointsNicoJuicy53 comments

These sorts of tools are definitely useful, especially for those that otherwise wouldn't have access to music instruction. But there would be huge pieces missing: teaching musicianship (perfect accuracy is a bad thing), finding repertoire to engage the student, arranging performance opportunities...

Basically, I think these tools replace bad piano teachers. Of course, there are a lot of bad piano teachers out there (a large percentage of all teachers, I'm sure), so I'm not saying that this sort of thing doesn't have value in increasing access.

Disclaimer: I might be a bit biased, since I have a music degree, have taken ~15 years of piano/organ lessons, and am also married to a piano teacher.

Serious question: what does it mean that perfect accuracy is a bad thing? I'm not a pianist and I'm not a professional, but I'm an amateur oboist (20 years in student/amateur orchestras). I think of technical accuracy as necessary but not sufficient for playing music. When I really have a piece down technically I can focus 100% on musicality, but I want the technical parts down solid.

Of course as I'm practicing, I am deliberate at working on both the technique and playing expressively. If I'm not deliberate about it, it's too easy to just focus on nailing the technique - it's a lot easier than the musicality.

For a simple example, any music that “grooves” (makes you want to tap your feet) tends to not be perfectly sub-divided into 4 beats. Different players in the same band may be intentionally (and/or subconsciously) hitting their notes on different parts of the beat to increase this effect. In this type of scenario there really isn’t any substitution for practice and “feel”, a metronome would never get you there.

In terms of piano, GP may have been referring to rubato, or holding notes for longer/shorter than notated for artistic effect.

Pop and jazz have "the pocket", which is where the groove clicks into maximum effectiveness.

Classical has phrasing.

IMO it's the same phenomenon. It's one of the most effective ways to add expression, and it's mostly taught aurally. There's very little in books for beginners about it.

If you're taught to play metronomically, you may never understand why it matters. Someone who is naturally musical will feel it without being told about it, but may still struggle to bring it out of their playing.

I see. I guess it was just me misinterpreting "perfect". To me it's obviously not perfect to play like a robot.

Agree, "perfect accuracy" was a bad choice of words. When learning a new song it's best to "never play a wrong note" – to make sure you play each note with 100% accuracy, no matter how long it takes you. This trains your muscle memory much more efficiently than playing less than perfect and undoing the muscle-memory-learned mistakes as you go along.

It’s called “swing”, right?

In some contexts, yes.

Roger Linn on groove: https://www.attackmagazine.com/features/interview/roger-linn...

Add in that technology can measure certain things, like whether you hit the right notes, but can't measure other things, like whether:

1. your posture is terrible (shoulders, arms, etc.)

2. you are arching / lowering your wrists

3. you are humming to yourself while playing ala keith jarrett

4. you are using the correct fingerings

5. you are playing in a way that can be sustainable for hours a day (e.g. you can play poorly for 1 hour but not for 40 hours / week)

My main reason for learning to play the piano is being able to compose or better express myself through music. I was "intuitively" learning to play the piano for 2-3 years, going through periods in which I would just sit at the piano and play the keys I liked, find the keys that corresponded with the sounds in my head and just letting go and having my hands move in the directions they wanted to. I got pretty cool results and loved the depth of my music, but I realized that I needed a teacher to make the next step.

Being guided by a teacher was invaluable and I recommend it to everyone. Mine focused on improvisation and music theory and i realy loved it. I was moving forward much faster than on my own. Unfortunately I lost trust in my teacher, after finding a little song on his youtube channel (he has a channel on which he teaches stuff with synthesia videos) that he shared a week after my first session with him, which resembled very much what I had been working on at home and shown him. I was really bummed out, never had the guts to ask him how that happened and stopped returning, because he kept asking me to play stuff that I worked on at home...and eventually I stopped playing alltogether.

After reading this article I got excited again about piano playing. Just found this awesome channel with lots of high quality synthesia teaching videos, including one of my favorite songs (Ab Ovo by Joep Beving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qRV68k3-jo )

> I would just sit at the piano and play the keys I liked, find the keys that corresponded with the sounds in my head and just letting go and having my hands move in the directions they wanted to

this should not be underestimated. I've learnt piano from a young age but you can get "stuck" in your learning. this is a great way to free yourself and get back to enjoying it again

If anyone is interested, I've been building a tool to help you learn sight reading and other piano skills. It runs in your browser and connects to a keyboard with the web midi api (chrome only)

You can check it out here: https://sightreading.training/

It's opensource: https://github.com/leafo/sightreading.training

It's very WIP, but I've used it a lot and I've definitely got a lot faster at reading notes. There isn't a good way right now to read rhythm in it. I pretty much use it as an experimental area for me to test new ideas to practice stuff, so there are a lot of little tools in there

I've been using SRT (thanks!) along with these 2 sites:

* Prelude: https://www.getprelude.net/#/sightReading?_k=wequj6 (source: https://github.com/BHSPitMonkey/Prelude)

* Sheet Music Tutor: http://www.sheetmusictutor.com/ (source: https://github.com/philippotto/piano-trainer)

Web MIDI is amazing.

Finding the piece you badly want to learn next is important to learning the piano -- just as finding a Roald Dahl or a J.K.Rowling book is important to learning to read.

Oh, and Bernhard's posts:

https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,12590.0.html

A tweet thread [1] from @realscientists (a Twitter account authored by a different active scientist each week) supports this point:

"People think math and coding are skills u r born with. ok there r prodigies out there. but most talented folks just work rly hard at it." -@realscientists

Replying to @realscientists "@realscientists Being good at math/coding usually coincides with it being fun." -@JesperEs

Replying to @JesperEs "@jesperes yep. Or useful... I hated coding in undergrad. Then forced to solve problems using code during my masters. Ended up loving it." -@realscientists

Finding a piece that you love or badly want to learn will allow you to put in the hard work needed to learn it and you'll progress in skill at the piano in the process.

[1] https://twitter.com/realscientists/status/369468586365968385

The problem is that you probably don't have an exact idea how difficult each piece is and might pick Chopin after Chopsticks.

Yes it might begin like that. Finding the first piece can be hard especially having just heard something awesome performed by a great pianist. Or encountering tepid elementary exercises in an educational-style publication. However, after you've got a few pieces under your belt then your optimism rises and your appetite tends to align with your present skill level. In other words the feasibility of a piece becomes a major factor in how much you want to learn to play it. (As with a novel, or a video game -- too easy or too hard are both boring.)

I always recommend this list.

https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/5k9jci/what_are_some...

Although, Minuet to Gymnopedie is a big 'jump'

It should be noted that there is a great Linux clone of Synthesia (which is awesome, btw!):

http://linthesia.sourceforge.net

EDIT: I wouldn't necessarily agree that learning a piece with [Syn,Lin]thesia means you don't gain any theory - its really a matter of picking your piece. Learn some great theory by loading it up with a Debussy!

Screenshots here: https://screenshots.debian.net/package/linthesia

To me, [Syn,Lin]thesia are very useful when YouTubers don't have time to transcribe the thing into proper sheet music. Hari Sivan[1] and Kyle Landry[2] do this and often times fans may work together to make a proper sheet[2].

Music theory helps piano players understand musical pieces better, simplifying the complexity of piano pieces and reducing the time needed to learn new pieces. It turns "put finger here, then this one here" into "play this major chord progression in the left while the right hand plays a melody starting on the first note of the major scale..." and so on. Even just understanding how to make different chords (major, minor, diminished, augmented, dominant, etc.) helps tremendously. It won't be learned from either [Syn,Lin]thesia or sheet music alone.

[1] Hari Sivan Rito Village Normal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdNUX6Z8rb0 => Synthesia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdq_NJvbUD0

[2] Kyle Landry Normal: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0UErv9b4Hn5ucNNjqD1UQ Synthesia: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdkSsVttkG60X5nC0CJ2Xjg Sheets: https://musescore.com/brycepoindexter

I started studying piano as child (music theory also), and still do 15-20 years later.

I cannot, at all, play from something like synthesia. I need partitions. I wonder why.

Me neither. I don't think synthesia is even remotely comparable in usefulness to a partition. It's really hard to read ahead (without the keyboard reference it seems really hard to identify which note is which) and estimating note duration from the note length is not as easy as just looking at the note. I always thought it was more of a gimmick (when talking about reading piano specifically, I assume it's more useful when creating music) than something actually useful.

Even for creating music, there must be easier ways to automatically write the partition of what you're playing ?

I never had a digital keyboard, so I never looked into capture methods.

I have used MuseScore, which has gotten much better.

Also tried in learning piano on my own, and pretty fast ended up taking real classes with a teacher. Piano is like tennis, you can easily develop bad habits and they are extremely hard to remove.

+1 for finding teacher.

I picked up piano when I was 25. After decade of playing other instruments being self taught I've decided to try to replicate formal education: basically I was taking classes intended for small kids (using private teacher), both theory, practice and study piece.

It was quite weird to play some weird kids melodies, but it was fun and being adult I was able to finish one year of child education withing one month. It was interesting experience and it really help me with understanding music.

btw I had to learn to play directly from sheet, which was something I had never done, so I've create small app to help me with that: http://notationtraining.com (you can even plug the midi keyboard for practice).

I was self taught on piano for years, and when I finally started taking lessons I had so many bad habits to break that were holding me back.

Reading notes was not the problem, but my technique for how I was physically striking the keys needed a lot of attention. Legato, phrasing and dynamics are the real challenge and it’s tough to practice things with such subtlety on digital keyboards at all. I still do it, but every time I play on a real piano I have to recalibrate.

The author says he chose a piano without weighted keys, I think that’s ultimately not the right choice if you are truly interested in learning piano and eventually want your skills to translate to a real piano. Pretty early on the proper technique is based on weighted keys.

I bet it's not as effective as an old lady with 5 decades of piano teaching experience. Every town has one.

Although I'm not totally disagreeing, I think a lot depends on the student/teacher relationship. Growing up I had piano lessons and the two people teaching me (not at the same time) were very nice/patient/encouraging, however they never really grabbed my attention the way goofing off and playing with the different piano voices, and following along with my pianos built in"tutor" songs did. I think my earlier more traditional lessons taught me a lot, however year without practicing later, the only songs I remember how to play are the ones that were built in to my piano, and a few others I taught to myself.

It also depends on the student/teacher match. I took piano for many years as a child. Unfortunately, I had a teacher who was firmly an advocate of the Suzuki method. The Suzuki method is a good method for some students that highly emphasizes precision. Songs are played over and over again until they are rigidly precise. I do not necessarily have an objection to this in principle, but for myself, I have a very small "twitch" in me that is normally wildly subclinical, but makes it very difficult for me to hold a rigidly steady beat for more than a minute or two without a twitch showing up. Even by the standards of music this normally wouldn't mean much, I never even noticed it playing trombone in band, even marching band, but in the Suzuki program it meant I was stuck playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in a variety of rhythms for what looms in my memory as years. I don't know how long it actually was, but it was way too long; by the time I moved on, I could only play sheet music in C, a crippling blow for a pianist.

Or, so I thought. A couple of years after I stopped formal lessons, I started composing on keyboard, and was deeply shocked to discover that when I was doing my own thing, I had no problem whatsoever playing in the key of my choice. It turns out that if you play enough scales for a given key, you can play in that key just fine.

Nevertheless I never did develop the ability to play sheet music in arbitrary keys without a lot of work constantly going into remembering the key.

I would have done a lot better with a teacher that figured out the Suzuki method was a poor match for me. Or if I had had enough knowledge to figure that out myself.

But it's much cheaper than in-person lessons.

My sisters teacher was a Catholic nun who would get mad and slap them if they played sloppily. My teacher was a very nice lady who never raised her voice. My sisters progressed a lot faster

Piano is not about mechanics. Everyone can do that. Piano is not about playing. It’s about hearing! And no app can replace professional human being with ability to hear these tiny nuances. Sorry to say that but if you want to play music, not piano, get a teacher.

Even if no app can replace a critiquing and guiding human teacher entirely, it could try.

Do many apps try that? Maybe it's a huge opportunity.

I would think so too. Everybody recommends finding a teacher (and a good one at that), but that's not possible for many people. Most people don't have access to good teacher, money to pay one, or enough time for scheduled lessons. Should they give up playing altogether? Even video courses are not good enough because they don't critique your technique or offer suggestions on how to improve playing at your level.

All the apps I've seen are terribly non-musical. They take small part of music (ear training, sight reading, repetition of phrases) and make you train in isolation. I would like to see an app that teaches music in context of music. Show me a concept in isolation (for example minor triad, or ii-V-I progression, or triplets), then play me some actual music examples, then allow me to exercise what I learned with some accompaniment and correct my mistakes. Such app AFAIK doesn't exist.

I agree that a teacher is invaluable, but for training your muscle memory (and sheet reading, if one does not already), apps can be a good-enough substitute: Instant feedback for almost free, visual aids that even a teacher could not provide, 24/7 availability.

Of course, some physical basics (like posture for piano, breathing for wind instruments) are ideally established correctly right from the start and that's where even a few hours spent on professional help will pay off.

Things I paid a teacher for (flute) that could have been easily checked by an app:

* tone: the right one? does it come out clean?

* pace: am I keeping the pace correctly? (a metronome does not flash red when I am out of sync, the 11 year old me could ignore it really well..)

* loudness

And last but not least: Apps work everywhere, lessons with teachers are hard to get in some places. When my parents decided we move, I had the choice between a 2h commute for a 45 minute lesson or to wait about 1.5 years for a place with a local teacher (despite having given solo concerts already). I stopped playing and regret it to this day.

Sure, computers can be very helpful to master certain skills like learning to read music or maybe mastering some aspect of technique. But to decompose music into aspects like tone, pace and so on is a huge oversimplification. And by learning to play piano I assume one want's to play music. Playing piano again in my view is about hearing, you have to play it in mind, make it sing, and only then bring that to the instrument. The instrument is just a tool.

I'm 40 years old, starting working with the Simply Piano app a few months ago and spend about 30 minutes to an hour each day practicing. I have zero prior musical experience. I think a piano teacher would probably be an excellent investment, my daughter started piano around the same time with a teacher and she is progressing slower, but I can see that she already has a much more solid base than I do and will learn to play much better than I likely ever will. However I'm not in this to learn in any serious way, just to noodle around and play songs that I like and I find that working with an app that gives instant feedback is a relaxed and low pressure way to do that.

The thing I like about Simply Piano is that I actually do it. But a lot of that is because I can do it on a little keyboard plugged into my phone on the train.

Pretty sensible self teaching approach. I thought this would be mostly about tools like synthesia, glowing LEDs built into keyboards and Ableton piano rolls.

My sense is that not many people get far with self teaching piano but some are happy to be able to e.g. comp chords out of Oscar Peterson's etudes book slowly or play a few pieces out of those Fabor Adult Piano books, which are pretty good.

I think most people that try to self teach a difficult instrument, trumpet or violin, give up. My sense of difficult is that anything I didn't learn as a kid is more or less difficult (I had 15 years lessons on 3 instruments)

Community college classes are a great way to satisfy that need to learn. Usually, community colleges have group keyboard classes, which are a great, cheap, and not-intense introduction to piano playing.

I studied piano performance in college. I do not recommend learning without a good teacher if you plan on taking it seriously. There's a lot that can go wrong. Also, in terms of information sharing, it's very difficult to find accurate/good information about playing the piano correctly without a good teacher (these are in pretty short supply) as a lot of that information just gets passed from student to teacher and isn't typically shared all that openly.

Interesting!

The piano is one of the hardest instruments to learn to play and play well especially compared to the guitar. I could teach anyone to play the guitar in a few sittings especially one with only three strings. Add more strings as the student progresses and in a few months or less they will know how to play rhythm guitar minus bar chords.

It took me years of sitting and playing daily to become a proficient player.

I've been learning piano for the past few years, and I will say I fell in love with the iOS app Simply Piano (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simply-piano-by-joytunes/id1...). I would highly recommend it for learning.

I've been learning with Simply Piano for about 6 months now and I'm amazed at my progress in that time. I'd highly recommend it.

An interesting alternative: http://www.flowkey.com/

Of course you can learn a lot on the internet, but it can take more time than you think. I'm not saying this apps are bad. But I just think sometime learning with a true person in front of you is more efficient. For exemple the fear of doing something wrong can add some pressure so you will have more motivation and learn faster.

Tech is nice but it's motivation that finally makes you learn piano. There's no replacement for a teacher that pushes you forward and of course you putting in the time.

Tech is similar to a siren calling you and then disappoints you. It might even be worse since you lose motivation and will eventually stop trying.

Yousician (https://yousician.com/) is another interesting app to help you learn. Useful for learning to read notes, but also listens to what you play and gives you feedback.

If the author is reading this, you can "move" the headphone port but purchasing a 3.5mm extender and velcroing it to the side of the piano, allowing for some more play in the line. Or a bluetooth device.

Local company applying AR tech to learning piano (and eventually other instruments)

https://www.music-everywhere.co/

Great, good luck on your journey and thanks for posting about your experience!

Maybe the commenters that insist on getting a teacher didn't read the end of the article?

I'm just about to start down a similar road with my 5 year old son. I'm intrigued how it will turn out. Yamaha EZ220 + Synthesia on Android.

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