Ask HN: How to learn to play piano? (kids and adults) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to learn to play piano? (kids and adults)

62 pointsdawidw38 comments

I'm looking for software, setup, ideas of how to learn to play piano in efficient way. For kids and adults.

Is there any software which may help to learn to play notes on the piano? I imagine that you could connect piano keyboard via MIDI interface and the software would present note which you are supposed to play. Then another note, and then revise the notes already learnt (in a Anki way/algorithm). Or maybe there is other, simpler/more efficient way?

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I started playing the piano when I was 8 years old and I’ve been playing regularly for the last 25 years. Here are some things that helped me:

- As others have mentioned (and you’ve said you have), find a good teacher. Apps, etc., can be helpful supplements but nothing beats having a real person sit next to you and give you feedback.

- As with a teacher, nothing beats consistent and quality practice time. The more time you spend in front of the piano the more comfortable you’ll be playing. Also: Don’t use those stickers you can buy that show the notes and letters of the keys. They’ll become a crutch and make it more difficult to read music in the long run.

- Ear training and sight reading are very useful tools, as well, and really are vital for most people to become competent musicians. There are many apps and programs out there to learn these two skills.

- This probably seems obvious, but listen to music from many different genres and time periods. I naturally learn by ear and listening to a piece before I sit down to learn/play it helps tremendously.

- Lastly, make sure this is something fun for you and your kids. I’ve tried to learn a few instruments and I was miserable with some of them but stuck with it anyway. It made my playing sloppy and honestly pretty terrible. Spend some time at the piano just messing around and enjoy the process of learning.

Don’t expect yourself to be the next Rachmaninov in a year. I’ve been playing for many years now and I’m still learning and fixing things. There are many pieces out there that I just physically can’t play. So keep the pressure off and enjoy. :)

Some specific recommendations:

- The Suzuki Piano Method (book)

- Alfred’s Basic Piano Library (books)

- EarMaster (ear training app)

- Tenuto (theory app, learn notes, intervals, chords, etc, from https://www.musictheory.net/)

- The Virtuoso Pianist by Hanon (This is a book to learn dexterity and finger independence. It’s somewhat advanced, but you can tackle it slowly and gradually increase your speed as you get better.)

Take Piano lessons by a professional teacher.

Software Playing the Piano can recommend Simply Piano by Joytunes on the Ipad, Android tablets. For Ipad you need an Apple camera connection kit to connect the USB from a usb midi keyboard towards the Ipad. Tip get the Camera connection kit with build in charge so that you can charge the ipad while playing, the screen is always on so it drains battery from the Ipad.

Also can highly recommend Superscore by Timewarp tech which allows play along midi tunes. There is a built in store for buying scores. Superscore follow along and pauses on the different notes and fills in accompaniment to make your playing sound richer. https://timewarptech.com/shop/music-software-apps/software/s...

Flashnote Derby which is an Ipad game which teaches Note reading its mostly focused towards kids but are good for adults too.

Get a 88 key piano with weighted keys in that way you are not limited to what you can play. Piano review site with detailed review azpianonews https://azpianonews.blogspot.com/2018/03/digital-pianos-unde...

1.) If you can count to 7, you can play the piano.

I really wish someone would have told me how easy it really is. I played guitar for years before I found this video. ( learn to play the piano in 5 minutes. )

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gnMDpBQ_bDQ

Press ANY key on a piano. Count up 4 keys. Press that key too. Count up 3 more keys. Press it. Now do all 3 at the same time.

Bam. Major chord.

Start at any key. Count up 3 keys. Press it. Now count up 4 more. Press that key too.

Minor chord!

Other chords are just a variation of that basic structure.

Of course, it takes awhile to make everything sound good. And if you want to play songs note for note then...

2.)synesthesia

https://synthesiagame.com/

I started piano lessons two and a half years ago, essentially a beginner, at the age of 38, and have been keeping them up. I love it and expect this to be a lifelong hobby.

I'm mostly going to echo the advice given by several others. First of all, find a good teacher.

If you intend to take this seriously, I'd strongly recommend that you learn how to read music. Software might be fun and useful -- but I'd recommend it as an aid, rather than a substitute, for learning traditional music-reading.

Buy a good piano. An acoustic is ideal, but there are also good digital piano options in the $1,000-2,000 range. Don't practice on a low-end $200 keyboard if you're in this for the long haul: it won't have properly weighted keys, and you'll develop bad habits.

Finally, the advice that my own teachers have given me: the way to be efficient in the long term is to be anal-retentive and slow in the short term. Practice scales regularly. Practice new pieces very slowly at first, one hand at a time, and build up from that only once you're not making mistakes.

I confess to sometimes ignoring this advice, but with the knowledge that the times when I do follow it are the times that I'm learning the most.

And, finally, I wouldn't expect things to be very simple or efficient at all. There is no shortcut to hours and hours and hours of practice. Totally worth it, if you ask me :)

Caveat, I'm an adult.

I just bought scores... traditional/folk tunes tend to have easy melodies, then they have books of sheet music for beginner/intermediate levels at most stores that sell music books. Sightreading books once you get to that level -- I found playing "new stuff" motivating and there are beginner ones.

There's software (like Synthesia) but I didn't find it that useful. If you get a digital keyboard they sometimes have tutorial modes that include interfaces to show you what to play -- didn't find that super useful either once I could read sheet music, which was very fast. Yousician is an alternative which does present sheet music and it's super gamified. However, in my experience, it was hard to translate the game to playing independently; I had no memory of any of the notes I played, and I would play them fast, but it would be hard to rewind and redo a section if I made a mistake. Fun game though.

You'd need to play scales and chords every day -- probably a motivation app can help with that. One thing I do is mix it with improvisation -- I practice 4-5 scales and chords in them and afterwards it gives me new ideas to improvise. I don't know if your teacher encourages improvisation since it's not targeted practice though. I don't have a teacher and I'm not planning to ever play at a concert level, but do want to get better composing, so for me it's more important. If for a child, place the piano or keyboard someplace in the house the child can just sit and play, and never, ever tell them they are making too much noise (or buy them headphones).

There are ear training apps, they actually work, and I think ear training is pretty much always useful, so it could be a 5min "workout" in between practices. I don't do it myself I just listen to music I like and try to reproduce sounds without the sheet music, but I do listen to a lot of piano music for fun, so the app may be easier for directed practice.

Berklee College of Music offers free courses on Coursera. Including Jazz Improvisation which could constitute a "hack" for quick learning of scales and progressions. Regardless of how "intelligent" the music interface is, I can't see any way out of hours of daily directed practice for mastery.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/jazz-improvisation

The year 2019 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Annus miraculus in jazz history. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, John Coltranes' Giant Steps, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Bill Evans' Portrait in Jazz, etc. A great time to get back into jazz and swing for piano. And even better considering we now live in an age where online "jamming" is possible with a decentralized band ;)

I use Anki to memorise scales and arpeggios. I have decks with all the scales and arpeggios, then for example it asks me to play "A major scale". If I play it right on first try I press Good, and the scale will be shown less often, and if I got it wrong I press Bad and it will be shown more frequently. It's a good way to filter the scales and spend more time on those you know less.

For simpler/more efficient I would look for a piano teacher. Ask around and see if anyone you know has a piano teacher.

We have a great piano teacher in our area who comes to your house. Students (Kids and Adults) progress quickly.

We have piano teacher. I was thinking about additional support. Like we also use Anki to repeat the foreign language vocabulary on top on standard classes with teacher.

Not sure how useful Anki will be for learning music.

Perhaps for reading sheet music? Or visually memorizing chords. You can add a mp3 file to it, and have a reverse card.

E.g.

"chord mp3 file plays" → what chord is this

"chord A" → how do you represent this in sheet music, what does it sound like?

I wouldn't go further than this though. Memorizing keys for a song should be done by practice

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear in my previous post.

We use Anki to learn foreign vocabulary, not music. My daughter really enjoys those 'quiz'. Besides she has normal classes with teacher.

We have also piano lessons with teacher. I'm looking for some software here to improve/encourage piano learning.

Perhaps beat-saber/guitar hero for pianos?

https://www.synthesiagame.com/

Haven't tried it personally but looks like fun

y, I would recommend doing extra practice each week, maybe ask your teacher for an additional practice piece each week.

After a while you might want to try out a new teacher too, every teacher is different so you might make gains in skill using a variety of teachers over time.

Not sure that technology is the answer here.

Midi + Synthesia https://www.synthesiagame.com/ worked for me, also Midi + Guitar/Drums with Rocksmith https://rocksmith.ubisoft.com/rocksmith/en-us/home/

Mind you having 5 lessons with an expert paid off way more than 50 hours of rocksmith.

I've been playing the piano since I was 4. Learn from my mistake: don't "cheat" by skimping on scales and other technical skills! I know it's not as fun as playing actual music, but as with anything, there is no royal road to piano proficiency. Now that I'm at a more advanced level, I really regret that I didn't put better effort into my scales when I was younger.

I took piano in college...and failed to learn it. Because I failed to practice, the root cause of which (in my mind) was the utterly uninteresting and unfamiliar drills.

Now drills are going to be boring, but when there wasn't a single piece I recognized, your 10th time through "Turkey in the hay" is both uninteresting and hard to know how your screwing up. I made more progress when I spent two weeks on my own trying moonlight sonata.

I dont recommend that piece to start with, and I do recommend a diversity to practice on, but finding tunes at a suitable difficulty that you KNOW can make a big difference - hearing what's wrong, getting a thrill when it sounds close enough to recognizable - these were completely missing in my class, and while I likely still wouldn't have put in enough practice time (dating had more thrills) it would have been much easier.

I've been kicking around the idea of taking it up again for 20 years, and this is the one change I would make.

I disagree with some of the advise on this thread so far. Scales are boring (I agree that you need them to get proficient, but if you start there, you’ll be bored to tears and give up before you get anywhere fun). Watching YouTube videos and trying to recreate what they’re doing is hard. Learning to read music from a human teacher is frustrating.

The traditional way to learn piano takes discipline, hours of slightly frustrating study and incredibly boring and repetitive practice. Though I tried a few times in my life to learn piano the way everyone said I should, I always found it mind-numbingly boring. Why does it have to be so damn hard?

I’ve only recently found a better way, and I’ve been learning faster, staying interested, and having way more fun than I ever did before.

The better way is: http://pianowizardacademy.com

(I know this sounds like a sales pitch, I’m not at all involved with the company, I’m just a happy customer and a big fan of their method.)

Basically the method hinges around software that turns playing a piano into a game. Similar to guitar hero, but where it leads you through a progression until you’re sight-reading the paper sheet music as you play. It makes it really easy to get started playing real music from day 1, then your excitement about your progress builds faster than the difficulty, so you stay interested.

Basically it inverts the learning. Play first, and learn reading music, notes, fingering, tempo, theory, etc as you go. It makes the whole process way less frustrating and way more fun.

The software looks straight out of 1998, and the DVDs are similarly a little silly - but it all works really well.

The DVDs are geared towards parents who have never played Piano, to teach their young kids how to play, while learning themselves. Watching the videos as an adult without kids, I sometimes feel a little silly playing along with a 4 year old, but since it works, I’m not complaining.

Generally, they explain the bit of music theory after you’ve been playing it for a while (ignorant to the fact that you were doing something deeply important to music), so by the time they explain the concept, it just makes sense - there’s no struggling to wrap your head around some obtuse concept that you don’t have a mental framework for yet.

Anyway - I highly recommend it. It’s not cheap, but so far it’s the best money I’ve spent on learning piano.

Story time. I have tried many online videos (Youtube etc) and I really never got anyway. I had wanted to learn how to play the piano most of my life but for multiple reasons (primarily fear) I never tried with a teacher. A year ago at age 31 I serendipitously ran into a woman who turned out to be a piano teacher in my town. Long story short, I started taking lessons and now I am finally playing the piano and it feels amazing! In cannot emphasize strongly enough the benefits of having a teacher. There is no way I would have gained the skills I have from taking online courses.

In my opinion, there is nothing more valuable that being able to have someone show you when you are making mistakes and has the experience to explain how to fix them.

Anki won't really help here. Flashcards work for natural languages because there's a huge vocabulary that you have to learn (10k words minimum for 'simple speech'). Sheet music is written with a very small "vocabulary": 12 notes that just repeat up and down the keyboard; a few dozen common symbols for dynamics, articulation, etc; a handful of note "lengths"; and that's about it.

The hard parts are getting your fingers to actually execute what they need to do, sight reading, ear training, and--most importantly--music interpretation. Ear training is the only aspect where I could see software helping.

My advice:

1) Definitely get a teacher, even if you only see them every other week. The function of the teacher isn't to "teach" per se--you'll be doing most of your "learning" in practice anyway--but you need someone to check up on you every once in a while to catch and break bad habits that you don't know you're even forming yet.

2) The most effective practice is the kind of practice that's extremely directed, focused... and boring. Practicing scales, trills, and arpeggios. Playing one bar of music over and over slowly until it's memorized and you can play it perfectly 10x in a row, then moving to the next bar. Every once in a while you have to put everything together to practice musicality, but that's generally going to be a small fraction of your practicing hours.

3) If you actually want to learn efficiently, you have to put in a pretty solid, consistent effort, i.e. 1h every day for you, 30min every day for young kids. Doing a bit here and there is like exercising once in a while: you just spend all your time losing muscle memory and regaining it with little forward progress. It took me 11 years of half-assed practice as a kid to play ARCT (university-level) piano, but only about a year as a young adult to get my flamenco guitar up to about 70% of that level. The difference? As an adult you can sit yourself down and slog through the boring stuff in order to save yourself time in the long run.

4) Keyboard is fine, but it has to be one of those high end, full size, weighted keyboards with synthetic ivory keys, etc (roughly $1-2k). These are usually marketed as "digital pianos", not "keyboards". The cheap half-length, unweighted, plastic key keyboards with tons of knobs and sound effects (e.g. $200-400) aren't meant to be used for playing piano. Those are more meant to be MIDI controllers for triggering synths, etc.

I have had amazing results using the Simply Music course teaching my two children starting at 3 and 6 years of age. They have introduced a new free online program:

https://pianoonline.com/

I have some questions for you:

* What do you mean by "efficient way"? Piano pedagogy is an old system that's been perfected over 200 years. What aspects of this system do you believe to be inefficient?

* Are you trying to supplement piano lessons taught by a teacher or are you trying to replace a piano teacher?

* Are your target students looking to learn classical piano or pop or jazz? Do they want to learn basic chords to sing along with, or do they want to learn to play instrumental pieces?

Been playing piano for 21 years. You dont need software to learn piano. This is really the worst way to do it. You need a teacher and a desire to learn to play. Then just practice. It will come eventually.

To learn sight reading, you play through books and books of music. To learn to play by ear, you play every song you've heard throughout the day. There is no secret to learning piano and no shortcuts either

Sort of a dumb question. I'm hearing impaired (profoundly deaf), but I enjoy music. I play guitar, albeit very badly, and I can't sing to carry a tune. Am I going to be wasting my time learning piano, or should I just do it and enjoy it even if it sounds awful to everyone else? :)

I'm mostly concerned that I won't be able to tell if I hit the wrong note or something and it just sounds awful.

I took piano lessons in childhood. I hated it. After college, I decided to pick it up, again. I bought a Yamaha 61key keyboard from Walmart when I was about 23. I also bought a Jazz Piano book. I taught myself "The Girl from Ipanema". I love that song. The keyboard costs about $120.00. The rest is time to practice. And you have to really LOVE music.

Move towards the closer piano that is solid and has the correct key size.

Set up the seat height at the correct position

For your family's mental wellbeing, assure that you can plug good headphones in your piano.

Start repeating the same sequence of notes one hour each day and counting fingers. Try it until it sticks and you develop a muscular memory, then go to the next scale.

Is much easier than a guitar in any case.

I built this tool that you might find useful. It uses chrome midi api to let you play piano into your browser: https://sightreading.training/

It's not going to teach you how to play piano, but it's good for drilling reading notes.

I'm a terrible piano player, so I have no specific advice about that instrument. However, when I was learning how to play trumpet, having my Dad introduce me to his Miles Davis/Louis Armstrong records really helped. For me, it was helpful being able to listen to something before I tried to play it.

SCALES. SCALES. AND THEN SOME MORE SCALES.

Reading music is actually easy. Comprehending the rhythm is the hard part.

A piano + an iPad with access to YouTube is all my son needed. He worked his way through the "Free Piano Lessons for Kids" channel, just one of many channels like it.

Just amazing what can be self-taught via YouTube these days.

Get a piano teacher. Injuring yourself because of bad posture or habits is not worth it.

These habits and postures are easily picked up by teachers but not easy to notice by yourself.

Forget technology, it's not the answer. Just get a piano teacher!

Try SimplyPiano app for ios or android.

Alright here's "hacks" and unfortunately there's no software or books to help you here, you simply cannot substitute the sheer number of hours needed to get to a point where you can comfortably sight read almost any music. I used to skip several Royal Conservatory of Music grades using these "hacks". But you are gonna be disappointed because it requires serious commitment, used to practice like 12 hours a day when I was a kid and eventually slowed to a point where I no longer actively play but able to pick it up and play the Rachmaninoff's Moment Musicaux from memory, this is the highest point I was able to reach, something that child prodigies master before they turn 10.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:

1) You need to get into the habit of not looking down at the keyboard. This was the very first lesson and took years. Eyes on the sheet music as much as possible. You should not have to move your fingers a lot when starting out.

2) This one will be a bit controversial but dont worry too much about form yet, just focus on hitting the right notes first. You do need to address it to avoid physical limitations when at the advanced level, I just didn't because I'm a rebel.

3) Practice reading new sheet music until you feel comfortable not looking down at your hand positions other than to check you are in the right octave and placements. You should be able to directly recognize and translate not only bars but entire paraphrases into "guesses". For a lot of people, those "guesses" are wrong but eventually I got to the point where I could sight read Chopin Waltz. This skill also translated well when I took up cello and was able to join a local orchestra within a half a year. Nobody believed me but being born to an immigrant family, I didn't have the luxury of taking things nice and slow. Basically, my mom had only limited budget so I had to somehow make the best out of each lesson and just practice the hell out of it. I did think briefly about a career as a pianist but that fizzled out.

4) Now the true hacky bit, which builds upon the previous skill that requires you to translate the notes to finger positioning without thinking. Challenge yourself to sheet music you can barely play both hands. I recommend Bach because it is missing the expressive dynamics and focused on rapid eye hand dexterity. Inventions a Deux voix or Trois voix play two and three separate melodic sequences.

4) The biggest break through and the aha! moment in rapidly mastering an instrument was to keep sight reading progressively more challenging pieces. By the time I finished the Bach Inventions, I was tired of the mechanical and depressing themes (the dude had to come up with new material or the guillotine) and naturally gravitated to Chopin.

5) Once again I applied the same routine. Finish the Chopin Waltz then the Nocturne and dabbled with Fantasia Improviso where I felt I hit a physical limit due to the horrible hand posturing habit that I developed due to focusing soley on sheet music reading.

6) At this point I could take on pretty much any challenge and boy did it take a long ass time. Just being able to play Moment Musicaux No.3 at 3/4 of Lugansky's speed (I consider to be the best interpretation....not because he's russian btw...well have a listen below) took years and years. I still can't reach his level. This is where the pros and amateur start to distance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhLDse5R8dQ

TLDR: Theres just no hack to mastering the piano. It's a lot harder than other instruments imho in some ways because you don't just play the melody like string instruments although it's easier in a sense that all notes are tuned and requires no other effort than striking a key. Not so with cello, without perfect pitch, it's tough to know if I'm in tune or if my "key" is right. When you hear amateur orchestras and professional you can tell the difference immediately because pros are so well synced along with high quality instruments.

Thank you for the advice. I tend to rush, I avoid the simple pieces and move on to more complex, "interesting" music to find myself quickly overwhelmed by the complexity.

I will try your 'hacks' approach to see what happens.

when you get frustrated, it means you need to slow it down, simplify the immediate task needed to build up the muscle memory to be able to sync each note on the sheet.

In the beginning, especially when starting a very difficult piece, practice only one bar at a time with the right hand and then the left hand separately.

Once you got the bar down perfectly, move on to the next until you got the whole line. Finally practice both hands to sync it up.

As you do this repeatedly, you will discover it gets easier. Because your brain is like a muscle. When you exercise it, it just gets better at the task.

Once you've digested something difficult and challenging, guess what, you've made leaps and bounds vs practicing simple pieces that won't lead to new breakthroughs.

I find this principle to apply to a lot of things, like working out. It's easy to jog, but jogging uphill is what builds those fast twitch muscles. On that note, please don't try to speed through the practice sessions. Once bad habits are formed, your brain literally is hard wired to make those mistakes.

Hell, even pianists will struggle with a new challenging piece and will not be able to rip through it on the first try unless they are like autistic savants.

If you really get to a point where you can't continue, then allow yourself to listen to someone else playing it. In fact this is the best way to keep dangling that carrot in front of you while you try to master a piece.

Easier said than done tho.

Do you have advice on learning rhythm for the piano? (Aside from "use a metronome", I do do that.) Are there exercises? I also have trouble recognizing how long a note is "in the wild" without a metronome or having a good idea what the tempo is for a song I like, so I suppose there's a listening component to this as well. Making sure to hit the notes at the right times if you haven't memorized the song just from looking at the sheet music I mean.

S L O W D O W N.

As much as you possibly can. If a song is in 4/4 and you're having trouble with it, pretend it's 8/8 and count by eighth notes. Still tough, go 16/16. Once you have it down, then increase speed S L O W L Y.

(much easier said than done, let me tell you, but it is effective)

^ this. Use a pencil to write the number of seconds. For advanced pieces you need to actually sit down and do a division and it's tricky to practice with both hands (like Fantasie Impromptu).

it's so tempting once you get the notes right to just let her rip at full speed but this was a bad habit and hard to break.

Now I try to play as slow as possible as often as possible. Only when you have it down perfect can you then start adding dynamics, expressiveness and your own take.

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