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For the tick of doom, I was taught something like 20 years ago: have six-sided dice on the piano. When I think I've mastered something, I test myself: put a die on 1. If you play it correctly, tick it up to 2. If you play it correctly, put it up to 3. If you play it incorrectly, put it down to 2. If you're truly committed to this, then you're going to feel pressure and nervousness when you get up to 4 and 5, because you don't want to go backward. Being able to execute the passage up to 6 under this pressure and enough times in a row is a better indication of mastery than just "it feels pretty good." If you find yourself bobbling up and down in the 3-5 range, it's probably not as solid as you think.
Ahhhh, that's a good trick - I might borrow that, if you don't mind. Another good one is to video yourself: similar to the dice method, the slight extra pressure reveals problems in things you think you've done. Thanks very much for that!
The other issue is if you're going back and forth between two or three numbers, you're doing more harm than good because you're messing up roughly half the time. If this happens, stop, figure out why you're messing up, slow it down, and fix it.
You are never too old to learn to play an instrument. I had never played a reed woodwind until I was 44 when I picked up an inexpensive clarinet, and it changed my life. I practiced 30, sometimes 40 hours a week and within a year I was better at it than I was on guitar which I had played for 20 years. The keys to success are passion, practice, and patience. The nice thing about being over 40 when you're learning something new, is that you probably realized by now that talent isn't just something you're born with. Talent is the result of practice and when you hear somebody with amazing talent, what you're really hearing is their hard work.
Can you share how'd you feel starting a new one? Like, how do you feel about the tone, the sound, the fact that you had to suck for so long 😉 just by nature of learning something new. I think about this sorta thing often, my body has thrown a wrench into my previous plans to sing or possibly play guitar. It's hard to have things taken away from us
And their passion, their inner self. All my life I have enjoyed listening to all kinds of music, but there are very few who have that 'extra something'. I love the sound of clarinet, an instrument with a special language, what pleasure you must have. Congratulations on your achievement.
Congratulations from me, too! People can and do make great progress over the age of 40 (and beyond). As you say, it's the realisation that it comes down to effort. I've found over the years that a lot of musicians don't like being described as "talented", because they feel it belittles the sheer hard work they've put in.
@@shaunreich I couldn't even get it to make a sound at first. But that first day I was discovering vibrato and over blowing, and within a month I was making my clarinet sound like a saxophone, or a trumpet. My tone was constantly evolving and it was great hearing the progress I was making. Especially the first 6 months, your improvements are super noticeable and week by week you are constantly getting better. I remember struggling with the upper register, and then a month later I could play the upper register without the register key. Your'e always chipping away at perfection.
The part about having the unique learned ability of grit as an adult actually made me tear up and feel powerful. Having recently turned 24, you reminded me of how much I've progressed and i am grateful to you!
As a keyboard player, this popped up in my feed... But as a martial arts instructor, I realised that almost all of these tips apply to my students! So thanks very much, this is a useful list for both arts 🙂
Glad it was helpful, Gary! That's a really interesting angle, actually, and ties in with a lot of my recent thinking about these kinds of problems. I think there is a huge overlap between learning piano (or any instrument) and developing skill in any kind of sport or athletic activity. In fact, there's a huge body of research in the field of sports science which just hasn't been tapped into by musicians, even though so many of the problems and challenges are identical or near-identical. We've been pretty good at assimilating and using (and occasionally misusing...) psychological and neuroscientific research, but there's all this stuff sportspeople do, and the research into it, that could be really useful to us. I guess it comes down to the cultural gulf between the two fields. Anyhow, please do chip in with views from the martial arts world whenever you like, because I'll be very interested to hear them - even things like breathing and warm-ups and suchlike have huge cross-domain value.
@@BillHilton Hi Bill. I finally got round to noting down the jiu jitsu version of your video. I'm going to post a link to your video on our facebook page with the notes if that's okay with you?
A tendency to race. Rushing through early classes might lead to later classes seeming unfeasibly hard, but allowing the earlier fundamentals to sink in will make the progress easier. Focus on mastering on what you’re doing now before rushing to the next technique. Lack of direction. We all get excited about new techniques and students often try to soak in as many instructionals & funky techniques as youtube will allow. But without guided progress, they will not be coherent, you will not get as many repetitions, and will not become ‘subconsciously competent’. It’s also worth noting that different practitioners often prefer different variations of techniques which, at the beginner stages, may prove counter-productive. The tick of doom. I often see in private and group classes the ‘got it, what’s next’ mentality. But all that’s happened is that you’ve progressed from ‘consciously incompetent’ (ie. you don’t know the technique) to ‘consciously competent’ (ie. you can do the technique if you’re thinking it through one step at a time). It it takes many repetitions to move that technique to being ‘subconsciously competent’ (ie. your body does the technique without you having to think about it). This is your goal, so push past the point at which you think you’ve mastered something and get your reps in. This is sometimes called ‘muscle memory’ and is what Bruce Lee was referring to when he said “I don’t fear the man who’s done a thousand techniques… I fear the man who’s done one technique a thousand times”. Don’t skip the drills. It’s tempting to skip past the movement drills and focus on sparring, but the drills will make you better at sparring as your body finds the most efficient way to move. It’s less fun, but utterly necessary. Not getting feedback. Make sure you’re either getting feedback from your coach, or videoing yourself to check details later with fresh eyes. A mistake repeated over and over can become ingrained and difficult to repair so get the habits right early. Inefficient practice. Plan your practice time to have a goal, whether it’s drilling old techniques, or new ones rather than training without a goal. Be aware of the ‘unknown unknowns’. When an instructor is teaching, he or she may sometimes assume some knowledge on the students part. A good instructor is happy to explain something they glossed over - remember, they may’ve been doing these techniques for decades and have forgotten what it felt like learning it for the first time, so watch out for stuff that isn’t obvious. Try not to over-estimate your weaknesses and under-estimate your strengths. Self doubt can hinder your progress, and older students often have learnt to have ‘grit’ and understand that commitment will always create progress. Remember you have strengths too… A black belt is a white belt who never gave up! Not doing enough reinforcement. Older students learn slower because they have less brain plasticity. But they also have the wisdom to realise that they shouldn’t be too hasty and it’s okay to repeat the basics until they’re properly bedded in. Thinking being good at jiu jitsu is about the number of techniques you know. Jits is so much more than techniques, and when things like understanding body mechanics, points of base, leverage, how to distract your opponent, relaxing at the right time, and breathing are important, a smaller repertoire applied well can be more effective.
One nuance I would add to “The Tick of Doom” is that self-learners are generally more driven to learn a piece that inspires them, and they might show more vigilance and patience in getting it right. Whereas the guided learner is more at the whim of a course or objective-based approach to getting a project done. Most people have the tendency to expedite the finish, but the desire to not be rushed is an important key to avoiding the Tick of Doom.
Excellent! Very valuable insights there, and I can't really add anything of value, so I've hearted in the hope people will seem them take them on board. Thanks very much indeed!
Sometimes the little scaled-down pieces in a course can demolish the door that opens the same music in a more complicated form. It is possible to play a piece by Chopin? Heavenly!
They say It isn't easy to teach an old dog new tricks. I'm over 60 and it's even more challenging when you have an old dog trying to teach an old dog new tricks! I've been using your tutorials for over two years and they have been so helpful. You are a clever guy and an excellent teacher and I greatly appreciate having free access to such high quality instruction
Regarding number 3, I've heard the difference between amateur and professional musicians is that amateurs will practice until they get a piece correct, while professionals will practice until they can't get a piece wrong.
Yes indeed, Jack - that's a fairly common expression! You need to be a bit careful, though, because it can lead you down a rabbit hole of perfectionism that leads to diminishing returns, and spending time trying to achieve the final 0.1% of perfection on one piece which you could be using to achieve the 80% of "good" on another. (Also in my experience pros have definitions of "wrong" that vary by context: for a concert violinist in the recording studio, there can be no "wrong" at all; for a piano player in a jazz club a lot of "wrong" won't even get noticed by the audience, so the goal is to practice so you can reliably produce something musical and listenable, but not necessarily technically perfect).
I was getting frustrated with my progress on piano, so I took a break and found this video - which made me realize that I'd jumped ahead much too far without properly honing the essentials. I've now settled down to working through lesson two of your course, and already feel like I have a better understanding of where my skills are really at, and what I need to focus on to get better. Thanks for helping set me straight, and for the incredibly useful course you've put up!
I just want to say THANK YOU ! I don't think people, including myself, thank people like you enough for taking of their precious time to share their knowledge with us. Thanks so much again!
Excellent point about the tick of doom! I had a drum teacher who told me that the brain commits things to long-term and muscle memory by doing things correctly repeatedly - lots of times, over a long time period. Therefore, that one iteration of playing something perfectly really should be the beginning of the final step towards mastery (and might be somewhat of an accident).
All good points, and it also applies to saxophone. (my instrument of choice.) One comment on brain elacity: adult are usually more results driven, and averse to experimentation. Allow yourself some leeway in your schedule to play freely, to make mistakes, to goof up, but enjoy the process. Then return to your scales. Your brain learns better when you're relaxed and 'safe', than when you're feeling frustrated, and your muscles are tense. I've experienced this over and over again.
Think it is important for a beginner to be able to play chords as soon as possible. You can then accompany yourself while doing scales and simple note progressions. Much easier and more pleasant to practice scales when you have an accompaniment and you may get some feeling for the quality of sound as well. Many beginners are put off the piano because they are obliged to learn to read music as well as learning the keyboard patterns: a bit like expecting a toddler to learn reading as well as uttering first words, at the same time. In other words, beginners will be put off learning if they do not experience some degree of melody in the early stages. Your course is traditional and excellent but many people do not have the patience to do all the learning of reading and playing before they eventually attain their first experience and reward of chord and note harmony. I was in a music shop some time ago and I noticed there were no student books beyond grade 5. When I asked why, the response was that most of the pupils never went beyond this level. Too much store is often placed on exam learning instead of enjoyment of music. I am an old learner and I think your course is excellent. However, I learned chord progressions from another course and I can now approach your in depth lessons with greater appreciation of the rewards to come.
This is insightful and has many parallels to teaching oneself a foreign language (I'm a linguist and have studied and also experienced this). In particular, one has to avoid the "tick of doom" and continue practicing on easy material (we call it "comprehensible input") to reinforce the foundations while also pressing on to new material. And I suppose grammar study is the equivalent of scales -- can't do without it!
Thanks Michael! I actually thought about including the parallels between piano and language learning in this tutorial, and it might appear in another one sometime soon (my wife is a linguist and my first degree was English, so we discuss language a lot in these parts…). You’re exactly right, though, because grammatical structures learned thoroughly in the same way one learns eg scales really stick with you: I can still chant German article tables that I first learned when I was 13, in 1987 or thereabouts. Der die das die den die das die des der des der dem der dem den…!
I am almost 63 years of age and I started learning piano just two months ago. I am not self-taught; I have a teacher and I regularly take classes, but I can immediately relate to every one of your points. Thank you for making this video, it makes me aware of 10 potential pitfalls in my piano journey.
Great video. The Tick of death: Remembering something and internalizing it are too different things. Stopping after a mistake and starting over again: Wait till you train yourself and do that live, in front of people. You also have to learn how to roll through mistakes and keep going.
You have nailed the essence here. I've been recording my self-learning progress for 4 years now and I can say with confidence - EVERYTHING you say is true and I think it is just happening to everyone. When I started I assumed I would be playing "decent simple jazz" in 2 years. Well, I'm into 4th year now and I know I still need some 2 years to reduce tensions feel comfortable and not think about "theory" while playing. Kudos to everyone who starts after 40! I have utmost respect for such people because I understand what it takes. Thanks Bill for all the hard work you are doing!
You’re welcome Adrian, thanks for the kind words, and kudos indeed to everyone who starts after 40! I feel very strongly that too many older learners get disheartened early on and drop out unnecessarily - if we can reduce the number that do we get more people having more fun playing the piano, plus all the other benefits that it brings (cognitive health, mental health etc etc etc). So I plan to keep plugging away on this stuff 😂
I’m an after 40 learner. And I decided to learn it when I saw some after 60 learner doing it. I thought, well, in 20 years I would probably play better. It’s never too late! 🙂
@@limavalepy I chose jazz as my "mission impossible" and I'm sure now that 10 years of sustained effort is enough time to be able to play anything and any level. All is relative though. Bear in mind that all the masters also played simple things. Music is not about virtuosity and showmanship. At least for me - it is about expression of what is inside me and only me. This is how I understand those things 🙂
Number 8 and 9 put me in a spell of depression for the past months. I'm finally out of it before new years and I've gotten more consistency with my playing since then. So now I run into your video and it's all of the things I needed to hear. I'm thankful for the algorithm god for making your video pop up. I'm even more determined this year to finally be back to an energized state of wanting to further my piano skills.
Good to hear it helped, Laura - I hope the algorithm god keeps smiling on you in 2024. Needless to say, if you run into any problems or have any questions, just give me a shout!
40 year old beginner here. Been doing the piano adventures books. Interestingly enough…coming from being a metal guitarist…i actually have a fetish for scales and arpeggios, and I have to force myself away from constant technical practice and work through learning the pieces in the book.
It's a very odd thing, Brad, but scales and arpeggios can be incredibly addictive, especially once you get into the habit of pursuing the (unattainable) goal of perfect evenness. They're the afternoons in the local garden centre of playing piano: I used to hate them when I was a kid, but now I actively look forward to them. Anyhow, that's good: it'll make a massive difference to your fine motor control, theory knowledge and reading skills. Keep it up, you're doing great!
Very interesting video and there are certainly a lot of gold nuggets if you watch this through the end. Personally I found the better way to get past 'the tick of doom' is to practice differently. So as an example: You know a lick or riff, now play it backwards, play it in groups of 3 or more notes, play it slower, play it to another meter, transpose it, and so on. This is method is better than, practice it another 30 times, and you internalize the lick or riff much better, plus it's more challenging and fun!
Hello. I'm just starting out. Bought a digital piano approx 1 month ago. I am satisfied with my progress (watching videos and trying to teach myself). I have to say, yours is the best series of instructions for complete beginners that I have come accross on the internet. Thank you so much for your video instructions. I am in no hurry to rush through the lessons. I am taking my time, and trying to develop new technicial skills at age 67. Thanks again for great lessons!
You're really welcome, and thanks for the kind words - it's always good to hear when my stuff is helping people. Let me know how you get on: 67 is actually quite young relative to some of the learners I hear from (!) so if you go at it steadily you should have the potential to do well. And shout if you have any questions at any stage!
A little tip for anyone searching for a good pathway after finishing the Beginner's course: There are several certified piano courses that have downloadable pdfs for their syllabus. In this way, you can progress through certain 'levels' of skill, by learning pieces, etudes, rhythm exercises, musical hearing exercises, etc. These levels of course prepare you for some form of official examination, but nothing is stopping you for using these syllabuses(syllabi?) as clear milestones for your own progression. I went with the Canadian standard (RCM), but there are several others (ABRSM, Henle).
I am a self-taught piano player and composer and have been playing since I was a little kid (I’m in my mid-60s now). Over the years I had to move primarily into composing because of career and family demands and practice time was less necessary in order to get good results. Now I’m trying to resurrect my technic and it’s proving to be daunting. Motivation is the issue. However, I keep remembering Benjamin Franklin’s (an autodidact) words: “He who is self-taught hath a fool for a teacher.” It’s good to get input from another source and reduce the foolishness a little. Thanks for the video.
@@BillHilton I can’t help but think that improving my technic will help my composition - especially the way I go about it using a DAW and software and hardware synths. Here’s a link to one of my pieces (thanks for asking): th-cam.com/video/pTa983LqdU8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=EfnzryNCjdXo0-tp
Its true self learners tend to not have a direction, but I am not sure it is always bad. Its bad if you are misjudging how much you know thats for sure, but if you are practicing stuff you like and you are pushing yourself you will integrate your knowledge in a much more natural way. I have friends who have been trained in muscic school and yet didn't rememeber how chirds are formed. Its fine to just know the chord but knowing why we refer to that chord as a minor and not major or the oposite is also important.
As a decent guitar player who started playing piano 14 years ago at age 55, I am pretty much familiar with your suggestions. Another thing that has cost me a lot of time on the piano however is that when I started, knowing a lot of music, I decided I would play only what I wanted to play. I started with Maple Leaf Rag and taught myself to read the sheet music. I got the notes under my fingers in a couple of months but I had problems getting a good sound. But I persevered. And persevered. And persevered. What I should have done was to also study other things. When I finally started doing that the Maple Leaf Rag actually got better. Eventually I finally got books to learn scales. When I don't feel like attacking the fine points of music, I can always plug myself into scales. And finally, metronome, metronome, metronome. Wish I would have started all those things sooner!
Thank you for your videos. I have been teaching keyboardists in pur church but I had a massive debilitating stroke 3 years ago. Now I send new musicians your lessons to prepare them. I usually teach shortcuts to making the chords and becoming very versatile to play any worsip song and how to improvise. Your videos cover all thàt. Thank you very much. God bless you for your generosity in sharing your talent and ideas.
I'm a self taught guitar player of almost 20 years but ive always been more captivated by piano music and get the best advice from piano players like in this video. I think I will join you goobers very soon.
This is very good advice! I'd like to add something from a more holistic perspective, to do with brain health and learning. Firstly, general health affects your brain function, so... - Nutrition - Exercise - Sleep Secondly, sleep is when memory consolidation occurs. Your brain can only hold so much new information before it gets tired. Don't try to learn too much in one day. Aim for only one new thing, practice it, sleep, then practice it again the next day to make sure it stuck before moving on to the next new thing. Thirdly, and this one may seem a bit weird, but it worked for me after more than one failed attempt at learning to play the piano... If you have a mentally taxing job that involves different things each day and a lot of thinking, you're already pushing the limits of your brain's learning and memory capacity. After work I was tired and had trouble focusing on anything for more than a few minutes. I'm not an early bird so practicing before work was a no go. What I did was sleep for one to three hours straight after work (no alarm, just woke naturally) to give my brain a chance to recharge, then I had a meal and did my piano practice before going to bed properly and sleeping for another five to six hours. I naturally have a biphasic sleep pattern so this worked very well for me.
This is really interesting - thanks very much! The stuff about sleep is tremendously interesting - there’s quite a lot of stuff in the research literature about successful musicians tending to sleep a lot, especially in their years of most in their years of most intense training. Thanks again!
I started your beginner course two weeks ago, now im in ep 7, thank you for doing these free lessons, it is helping me a lot. Im from Brazil and learning english and music at the same time is such a great experience, thank you so much Bill Hilton 🙏🇧🇷.
You're really welcome! I've had several really dedicated learners from Brazil, including one guy who started the course using a hand-drawn keyboard on a piece of paper. Glad to hear you're getting through the course: let me know how you get on, and if you run into problems!
@@BillHiltonlearning in a piece of paper is madness, but im sure he got that. and yes ill write my problems and my evolution down there, hope you see it later.
Thanks Bill for the video. Good to see you in the garden! I think your 10 suggestions are very pertinant. Another problem I’ve only just identified after feedback is that I wasn’t playing in time. I now use a metronome and try to count out loud - big improvement. Also play slowly and accurately. I’ve found your videos really helpful during my piano journey. Thanks again. About to subscribe to Patreon. Regards Peter
I am currently running through the beginner course. After over 35 years of messing around with synthesizers I finally decided to learn how to play properly. It is excellent. Your advice is spot on.
I love the fact that I stumbled upon your channel! I have been playing guitar for decades. After getting a piano for my son, I started building chords on the piano myself and it "clicked" for me how they are actually built. After some contact with the piano, I can look at a chord name and immediately play it, even a complicated chord is fine. I was thinking of learning it even more deeply and am really glad that someone is giving us so much insight into this learning experience.
Thank you, and I'm glad you like it! I've been doing this for more than ten years now, and I've really come to realise in the past year or so that covering the learning experience (and the learning _process_) is as important as dealing with all the technical stuff. So there's more like this to come!
So many of these mistakes resonated! I am self teaching and I have gone 3 weeks now. Reinforcement is my issue and many times I simply focus on getting the note correct that I ignore the tempo. My son, Alex, has gone off to university and I have always wanted to learn and play the piano and it's great company. You are an excellent teacher. Thank you.
You're welcome, Debbie-Ann, and thanks for the kind words! Let me know how you get on, and also if you have any questions. It sometimes takes me a little while to reply (I get a lot of comments...) but I always do!
My digital piano arrived today and had a free 3-month subscription to Skoove. I've been holding off trying it because it seems more like you're matching buttons on a screen than really learning.
I'm a lifelong self learner. I use pyramidal microlearning. Switch angles, often, so practise various skills, rotate, also blend in pleasure parts. EG sometimes technical and straight, sometimes let loose even with mistakes, builds a different kind of flexibility especially with genres that allow it like blues. Switch, rotate, vary, repeat, enjoy, sweat, curse, rejoice, cherish.
Interesting - both to hear your approach and to hear from someone who thinks so carefully about the learning process (…often the hallmark of successful learners…). I’m very interested in micro learning in general, but could you maybe expand on the “pyramidal” aspect of that? Is it to do with prioritisation?
@@BillHilton what I mean by pyramidal is circling large circles through various aspects but rotating fast enough so as not to get stuck. With enough momentum one would rise through levels and need run shorter circles as in a cone rather than a pyramid if you wish. It does need speed and efficacy. I do think about it deeply as I play piano for producing my own music which requires multiple instruments for composition plus mixing so I'm circling several cones at once. Tough but fantastic.
I'm 66 and have been playing off and on most of my life. But I feel I've reached a point where I don't get any better or play more complex. Non-musicians think I'm good but I know how much better I could be. On a scale of 1-10, I'd put myself at a 3, and I know if I focused on a course, I could reach 6-7. Maybe I'll give your course a go. I'm retired, just had a kidney removed, so time is definitely not an issue. If I start now, by the time I'm 70, I could be quite good in the eyes, and ears, of other musicians.
Give it a try and let me know how you get on! I would say, by the way, that you may be underwriting yourself - if other people think you're an eight and you think you're a three, the truth, may line somewhere in between… Good luck with your recovery!
The "tick of doom" issue also involves keeping playing what you think you have mastered, for a few days. Or at least check that you can play it as comfortably the next day, and the day after. It always takes time (and sleep) to process something and get it in your long term memory where it feels that you can play it without thinking (feels like "muscle memory").
Great advice. Particularly isolating a problem bar and then re-integrating it, and keeping on playing previous pieces. Those are probably good advice for a lot of things. I would only add 'Enjoy your music.' Music is a fundamental ingredient in our lives, walking in time to the beat, humming while doing the housework etc. don't make it a drudgery, practising isn't a punishment, it's a path to progress.
One more here. Just turned 40 and got to myself a keyboard, getting here in a few days and will start trying your videos. I love music but never played anything before.
As a 63 year old trying to learn to play the piano, I've found your advice extremely helpful. I can relate to everyone of the points you've mentioned and those points are probably the reason why I didn't succeed in my two previous attempts. I'll try your free course for a start... Thank you very much for your videos
Not learning piano, here; just picking up the guitar after decades of not playing, and your insights have given me some valuable lessons on moving forward when I thought I hit a wall. Thank you!
I love when you play a Chord 1-3-5. But. If you start with a major third, shift it to a minor third (even if it's not allowed). Or vice versa. Shift the minor third to a major. Make sure you play the 1 &5. Aww sounds so good. Works inverted too.
Thank you, Bill, it rang every bell. I am a teacher myself and the more I teach, the more I wish my piano teachers from the past had taught me about good practice technique. I now find that more and more of the lessons I give are about the exact things you talk about. And I try to make sure that when I am practising myself, I don't fall back into the (bad) habits of the past. I am going to share your video with my teenage and adult students - thank you so much for your clear exposition and your intelligent solutions.
I've been self-teaching since late 2020, with about a year of in-person lessons from a teacher sprinkled throughout. There are many great points in this video, but I'd also like to share some of my own experiences and what really helped me. The biggest piece of advice I can offer to any beginner is to _be consistent._ There's a reason piano teachers often tell you to practice 15 or 30 minutes every single day. It's easy to maybe think "oh, well if I just practice for 2.5 hours once a week that's just as good." No, no it isn't. Long practice is fine! You should do long practice if you believe it will help you! But you also need to have consistent reinforcement, every single day, of things you've learned. There would be times where I'd be trying to pick up something new one day, probably before even going to bed, and after 30 or so minutes I just can't wrap my head around it, can't get my hands or fingers to listen to me. No matter what I do I just can't seem to get it down. I could sit there for another hour until I get it, but that doesn't mean I've even learned it. So after that half hour, I just say screw it, and go to sleep. The very next morning, I go to practice that, and suddenly it is much easier. It's still not perfect, but I can _hear and tell and feel_ that it is beginning to make sense. Consistency is super important. It's not so much about how _long_ you practice, but how often you reinforce that. Some days when I have nothing going on, I may practice something for half an hour, go do something else for several more hours, then go back to the piano and try it again. The point is, you need to be consistently learning, and this doesn't necessarily mean playing stuff you can _already_ play. It just means focusing on the things you know you struggle with. Additionally, in terms of scales and exercises, I ended up developing many of my own inventions and exercises. I mostly did this by taking things I could already play, and coming up with new ways to play them. A very common thing I like to do is try combining left hand chords or arpeggios from one piece, and figuring out how to combine it with a right hand melody for something entirely different. This takes awhile, and often requires me to figure out (by ear) how to transpose the different parts into different keys so they work together harmonically. But this specific approach to traditional exercises trains _many different aspects all at once._ You should still absolutely play scales, go through the traditional exercises too. But don't be afraid to get creative and noodle around. The exercises I developed is what actually helped me develop my ear, I also developed a very good sense of rhythm (as I often had to mish mash things of different rhythms together), and I learned of intervals long before I even knew what they were. I started to notice loads of patterns, the relationships between notes, etc and realized I can use that to figure out how to play things by ear. By the time I started taking lessons, there was a surprising amount of beginner stuff I already knew. And what's crazy is, this even translated to learning sheet music. I was sitting there painfully trying to read things note for note, and then I said to my teacher "wait a minute, it's not really about the notes, it's more about the gaps between them, right? that's how people get really fast at reading music, isn't it?" and she said "yeah actually, you can just see the gaps and know how far apart they are." Another very important thing is to break the stuff you learn down into chunks. Before I even knew what phrases were, I was already doing this instinctively. When learning something new, whether by ear or by following sheet music, I would always chunk it by phrases. By doing this, you can break away from the habit of playing from the top when you hit a mistake. I would learn a phrase, then learn the next phrase, and then play just a bit of the end of the first phrase to get used to transitioning into the next one. Instead of hitting a spot that might be hard and force me to restart, I would just instinctively restart on where that error occurred. Surprise surprise, this was almost always in the transitions between phrases. This was also something my piano teacher was surprised I had no trouble with. When I would hit an error, when I'd anticipate I was just about to hit the wrong note, I'd stop and hit the right note. If the timing was off, I'd start over that one singular bar and repeat it until the timing was right, etc.
This is brilliant - thank you very much indeed for taking the time to share it. I can go on about this kind of thing as long I like, but when people hear it from fellow learners I think it really hits home. Much appreciated!
@@cyrusthe0ther795 I'm not so sure about that, I by no means would say I am more or less talented than anyone else. It's just practice. LOTS of practice, even if it's ineffective, is still better than NO practice or not enough effective practice. Some may argue otherwise, but I disagree. The first time I started self-teaching, I got a cheap 4 octave MIDI keyboard. The goal with this was to see if I could even get my hands and fingers to listen to me. By day 2, I was able to play broken chords, play quarter note chords in the left hand and half note chords in the other, and I even developed a simple progression to go along with it. Technique was awful, I just kept my fingers locked in one position on both hands, and moved the hands around to the spots the needed to be in for those chords. The point is, I was able to reach this after many many hours of literally doing nothing but playing, finding things to play, and following some exercises here and there. Ineffective practice? Yes. But I think this gave me a much better start with the piano than if I started with formal lessons from the get-go. Another thing I want to mention is the...I guess insincerity of popular piano videos on TH-cam? People see things like this, especially "progress" videos, or see things like "I learned this in 3 days", and they think they may be able to do it too, and don't at all get a real picture of the sheer time investment. The hard reality is, that person who said they learned something in 3 days? They're technically telling you the truth, but what they didn't show you were the dozens of hours of slowly learning and memorizing it, in addition to the 67 recordings they made where they kept screwing up. I know that _this_ is the behind-the-scenes nobody bothers to show you, because that's the behind-the-scenes for me. They showed you the one take where it was good. If you told that person to play that same exact selection of music right now, I guarantee you they'd screw up and start over. That means they haven't learned it, they still have _much_ more to go with familiarizing themselves with that music. It's really just about how much time you're willing to invest into it. I built up lots of familiarity with the piano long before I even took lessons. And the only reason I wanted lessons in the first place is because I realized the only way I'd know for sure I've been doing stuff right is to see what a teacher says about it.
@@spartan456 I was just commenting on how you found methods on your own that were effective. Justin Sung a youtuber who teaches proper study techniques, talked about talent just being people innately following effective learning habits. If you can learn them though then there is no difference between you and someone with talent. To me complementing on talent isn't a compliment and if anything is should be used to bring someone down by discrediting their work. What do you mean by making your fingers listen to you?
@@cyrusthe0ther795 Oh, that's actually really fascinating! I never really thought of talent like that before, that makes a lot of sense though. By "making my fingers listen to me", what I mean is the struggling nature of first trying to play the piano. More often than not, this is the hardest part for beginners. They'll know the next note they have to play is a C, they'll know the 2nd finger in their right hand is on the C, but when they have to play that C they'll maybe play a B on their first finger, or a D on their 3rd finger, etc. Hell, maybe their brain will throw them a real curveball and tell them "move your whole hand, we're going to a new key." It gets even more confusing when you incorporate your other hand. You got 2 wrists and 10 fingers to keep track of, (and feet, too, when you start using pedal) and you gotta do all of this in a certain amount of time. For a lot of people, it's a kind of overload I guess. A really common thing you'll see on many piano videos is "how TF do I play this with both hands?" This is something that just naturally gets easier as you mechanically familiarize yourself with the geography of the piano, and this is one of the many reasons traditional scale exercises are so fundamental. Half the time you spend learning some new music, it's gonna be memorizing the fingerings and locking that in. Scale and key exercises sort of act like a training bicycle. If you learn Bb Melodic Minor and can run through it with your eyes closed, then next time you see music in Bb, well, you'll kind of already know how to work with those notes. It won't take nearly as much time to work out fingerings, because you've already been there.
I have the opposite of the "Tick of doom". I love the experience of playing music, but I'm not that excited about the learning process. So last time I tried to learn (as a teenager), I would spend 10% of my practise time working on learning a new thing and 90% just playing all the stuff that I've learned already. None of it perfect though, and I didn't feel like I was making further progress even though I could often hear my mistakes.
That’s an interesting one, because you’ve made a point that I thought about including! The temptation to play rather than practise is a pretty major problem for pianists at all levels (including me) - so it’s not just teenage you that ran into this! Personally, I only think I’ve started practising really effectively since I’ve been an adult, and in fact probably past the age of thirty or so. It’s only since then that I’ve really had the grit to consistently challenge myself with stuff I find difficult (obviously I did do it as a kid, but nowhere near as consistently and efficiently as I could have done…!)
the tick of doom gets me with training exercises all the time. Especially simple (ish) exercises. I get the fingering in my head and move on before I've really built the muscle memory
Yep, it's a very common problem, and you have to keep fighting the urge - that's my experience anyway, because half of these things, I still have to watch out for in my own practice…!
I really need to work on number 5. I’m mostly self taught on piano, but had classroom lessons on different instruments and music theory. Since I regularly play with normal people listening I get an abundance of positive feedback. But, I haven’t sat down with an expert to get more constructive feedback in over a decade. And even then it wasn’t really a “Here’s how you can get better” it was just “You passed the class/test”
Half the challenge is finding the right kind of expert, Jonathan, because good musicians often have trouble seeing things from the perspective of learners. An actual experienced teacher is probably your best bet, and even then it helps if it’s someone who is used to teaching adults and doesn’t just approach them like they’re big kids, if you see what I mean. But if you can find such a teacher and actually physically sit down with them at a piano, you’ll find it makes a huge difference. Just last week I played some bits of Bach and Brahms for a friend of mine who’s a much, much better classical player than me, and got twenty solid minutes of really invaluable advice that has already improved my playing. So it’s definitely worth bending over backwards to sort out. Let me know how you get on!
Okay. I’m convinced. Now 78 years old and totally back to basics after starting out many decades ago. A lot of what you say is me…I have drifted from to many tube lessons and never settled on one. Thing is I don’t have a piano as such. It’s an organ.. a real nice vintage sit up and beg with all the bells and whistles. Love it. Technique I’m sure will be different but the basics the same. I shall join your classes Bill but there will be a break as I’m off on some travels.
A year and a half ago I used your beginner tutorials to get into the basics. I still play one of the basic pieces. However I realized I was getting bored with the path. I took time to learn some basic music theory which helped immensely. I also began allotting time to improvisation: thoughful play where I chose a key and played whatever chords/melodies while focusing on what I was doing, and then creative play where I just played what sounded nice without worrying about what or why I was doing things. Combined with more practical lessons, I found myself becoming more attuned to the instrument and enjoying the sounds and pattern I was discovering. Thank you for helping me learn enough to enjoy the piano. Now is a good time to revisit your videos and fill in some gaps in my current knowledge and technique.
I'm glad to hear my stuff has helped! It's interesting that the way you found of making progress involved working with several different strands and also building in creativity and theory. Increasingly I think the key for self-teachers is building in variety and exploration to help stay engaged. I hope you continue to do well, and please don't hesitate to give me a shout if you ever run into any problems or have any questions.
Thanks Bill. I'm 72 and have been working at your For Beginners course for a year now. Before I started your course my music education stopped in primary school, but I'm happy now to be able to read music and pick out some simple tunes. Keep up the good work!
You're welcome, and thanks for the kind words! I'm glad to hear the course is working, and I hope you continue to make progress. 72 is on the young side compared to some of the learners I've seen make progress, so you should have lots of room for development yet. Good luck, and get in touch if I can help in any way!
Bill, I take hope from a story about Pablo Casals who when asked why he continued to practice his cello at the age of 90 said because I'm noticing some improvement. Would love to chat longer but I must get back to the piano. Cheers to you Bill!
@@trantrungnghia9642 Sadly, reality forces you to make some compromises. The worst is when a passage needs more work but you notice that each repetition is worse than the last. You have to stop and revisit later as simply continuing will make it worse.
Actually I start by practicing so slow that I get it right every time and because the muscle memory is ingrained it's much faster then practicing fast until you get it right.
@jack-ju1ft That is ideal. Still, I run into some things where I have to make decisions on fingering. So I try the various options a few times and want to make sure I don't choose one that won't work at performance tempo. Then the repetitions are about making sure I actually follow my chosen fingering.
Great video. My daughter bought me your book for Christmas years ago and I never got beyond the opening page. Most of what you say here is about me. I have some decisions to make about how seriously I am going to be about finally learning the piano in a thoughtful way. Thanks for opening my 80 year old eyes. Regards and thanks for your great work.
You're very welcome, Bobby, and thank your daughter for buying my book! By all means give me a shout with any questions you happen to have if you decide to press ahead: I'm increasingly taking an interest in older learners and trying to build up some kind of body of knowledge about the most effective ways of helping them. So hearing about people's experiences is always useful!
Hello, I am 70 years old and trying to learn Piano now. Well, I did some Jazz-Clarinete, but Piano is a different thing. I am very happy to come across your "Piano Self-Teacher Problems". That makes me avoid a lot of them. Knowing myself, of course I would have fallen in some of these traps. Thank you so much.
You’re very welcome! If you find yourself facing any specific problems or you want guidance at any point, please don’t hesitate to ask - it sometimes takes me a little while to reply, but I always like to help if I can.
That's really very kind of you. At the moment I'm working on the bass clef, which I have to learn. As a beginner, you have a lot of questions, but I'm exploring what I can solve myself by studying. However, my clear goal is to learn jazz piano. Free improvisation and knowing how to use the right chords. But first and foremost comes the practice routine. If only there was a video that showed you a daily practice routine to make your finger muscles more flexible.@@BillHilton
I've been playing piano (badly) for around 40 years and this is the first time I've heard of the "push past" / tick of doom thing, which makes perfect sense to me. Thanks, great video.
You're very welcome! I coined the expressions myself, but the idea - especially push-past - is an old, old one that I first learned (from a guitar teacher, actually) when I was about 14.
Foe me, my biggest booster on my learning has been to play keys on a pop/rock band. That has helped quite a lot with rhythm, listening to other people instruments, complement them and knowing that you need to continue, even if you make a mistake. Fast recovery from that is crucial on a band. Show must go on!. I am about five and a half years on my playing journey and one year and a half playing on the band. We have done so far five gigs and have another one in a week. We rehearsal weekly, also a very important thing. Playing in public, in general, is also a real booster. I have been playing any piano I can play on any venue, from stations to hotels. And I am just a beginner. But people enjoy it if there is passion on your playing. Don't be shy, communicate your inner music by playing to people. The first time I got an applause I joyfully cried. I was less than two years playing back then, and it was a humbling event.
This is a really excellent insight, Jose - thanks very much indeed. Any kind of playing with a band, or public playing, is hugely beneficial. I hope you continue to make good progress!
Thanks Eleanor - you're the second music teacher to come along in the past couple of days and say this rings bells, so I'm really glad I seem to have landed on the right set of problems. Over the past year or so I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about this whole nexus of opportunities/difficulties that exist around self-teaching: on the one hand, TH-cam offers great opportunities to learners, especially adults, who don't have the time/inclination/funds to work with a teacher, but at the same time it presents this whole set of challenges with feedback, planning, direction and so on, many of which won't be obvious to a beginner who has just got hold of a digital piano for a few hundred pounds/euros/dollars and is trying to make sense of it by themselves. Anyhow, I'm always really interested to hear opinions from working teachers, so please do feel free to chip in whenever you like!
Taking a video of oneself practicing was a great idea! Immediately spotted a postural error that is most likely behind the ache that I keep getting in my right arm after practicing a little while. Thank you!
You aced it Bill. Every one is winner. I'm a different kind of late beginner. Played guitar, mandolin, mandola, banjo and viola in every style from A to Z. Played in an orchestra as an adult doing classical mandola, so some of the beginner piano stuff is not hitting home for me. I quite like scales and know what I need to do. However at my age lessons are expensive and the clock is ticking. Of course I'm falling into a lot of the traps, but will take your advice on board.
Glad you liked it Phil - I don’t get many mandola players commenting: I imagine it’s a pretty challenging instrument in its own right (I’ve only ever tried mandolin).
Most important message about learning piano I've seen. Having been taught properly and now recapping in later life all these issues ring true. Feel like I have a teacher again. Thank you. I'm not convinced you can learn piano alone or online at all. There are a lot of used digital pianos for sale in barely played condition. It's tough.
Thanks Rob! I think it is possible to succeed as a self-teacher - I’ve seen people do it - but it’s not easy, and I’d guess that the majority who set out don’t make it. That people’s definitions of “learn piano” vary: some just want to play enough to be able to handle a few of their favourite songs, while others want to learn to a professional level.
You’re welcome, Sue - I’m glad to have helped! Over the past year or two I’ve started to get very interested in how older learners make progress, so give me a shout if you have any questions/need any help. (Not that 68 is very old - I regularly hear from learners in their eighties and nineties…!)
Im a guitarist, now songwriter and recording my own demos has been the greatest blessing to my improvement as a musician. It motivates me to learn what’s in my head. I’m not going to leave that vocal run or piano fill out of the song, because it’s too hard.
All so true Bill. As a selfteaching pianoplayer I recognize everything you say so I wrote down all 10 problems and printed them as a reminder. Many thanks!
After seeing this, I realise I do all the 10 things mentioned in the video. However, I'd say that my take from it is not to race, get more feedback, and listen more while playing. Thanks a lot, this was very helpful.
Thank you, thank you! I’m 76 and have decided to be serious about actually learning how to play. It’s more difficult than I’d anticipated it being and I often forget what I had just done well yesterday. Your tips and words of encouragement couldn’t have come at a better time! Thanks again!
You’re really welcome, Joni - let me know how you get on, and give me a shout if you have any questions. It sometimes takes a while for me to reply but I try to get around to everyone…!
I’m over 55 years old and have been learning to play the piano for almost a year. I’ve spent my whole life as a physics teacher and scientist at the university. I knew my hearing was so poor that I couldn’t distinguish sounds or recognize musical notes. A C or an E sounds the same to me. My son, who is over 30, started learning, and he’s making some progress. So I bought a piano too -a t least I can delay the effects of ageing by doing musical exercises that neither my brain nor body is used to. 🙂 (sorry, I wrote this message in my mother language, then translated by AI and then edited some stuff) Since I have extensive teaching experience, I’ll comment on the self-teaching problems discussed in this video. 1. A Tendency To Race The Bill's words are very accurate. I didn’t rush. New skills have to form, and for that, new connections between neurons responsible for those skills must develop. These connections mostly form during sleep, so you have to play the piano many times for something to develop. 2. Lack of Direction This idea is also true. If you want to learn something, choose one source, such as a textbook, and study it thoroughly. When you have a solid base of knowledge, you can browse other books for more interesting material. I’m glad I chose Bill’s lessons as the backbone of my piano learning. 3. The Tick of Doom Now, here’s a real challenge. Some elements took days or weeks to practice. For example, the second bar of lesson 8, with fast notes, I don’t even know how long that took. Or lesson 9… the first two bars also took weeks. Little by little, every day, I could spend 20-40 minutes; I had no more patience than that. On average, one month-that’s how long it took to master one lesson. I didn’t work every day due to other responsibilities, but I tried to fit in at least 20 minutes whenever possible. There were probably no days longer than 60 minutes of practice. So, in 11 months, I covered about 10-11 lessons. 4. Scales & Exercises Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Every time I sat down to play, I’d go through everything I’d learned from the first lesson. It was like warming up for athletes before tackling the hard part, for which I barely had enough patience for a few minutes. Sometimes I skipped exercises-like lesson 7’s, which was boring. I played scales every time until one day, I reached the major scales, and now that’s part of my warm-up routine. Three scales are too many; I keep repeating just two. 5. Not Getting Feedback This is a real problem. You don’t want to be discouraged, especially if someone says you’re doing something wrong, and you’ll have to relearn it. That’s the scariest threat. Somehow, it’s easier to stay in your own bubble. I reassure myself that if I can play smoothly, it must mean I’m not doing everything wrong. :-) 6. Inefficient Practice It’s hard to assess this. Still, I think if you overcome the technical “finger” problem and gain freedom, it means maybe you didn’t do it in the most optimal way, but if it works, it’s not that bad. 7. Unknown Unknowns I haven’t reached this level of understanding yet. When I finish all the beginner lessons, I’ll start figuring out what I’m doing wrong. See question 2. :-) 8. Overestimating Weaknesses/Underestimating Strengths I think it’s better not to overthink this. Just overcome the tasks, and the results will show. 9. Lack of Reinforcement I think it’s better not to overthink this, either. Just complete the tasks, and the progress will become clear. When I reviewed the notes from the first lessons, they seemed much simpler compared to lessons 10 or 11. Only then do you feel that you’re actually making progress. 10. It’s Just Pressing Buttons Bill’s comments are accurate, but unfortunately, you can only think about the colours and richness of the melody after you’ve learned to hit the keys correctly. That means you shouldn’t worry about it too early. First, conquer the beginner's course. :-) Sincerely,
Amazing video, and amazing tips! Fascinating that the non-piano specific tips seem to be nice advice when extrapolated to approaching learning most skills in life.
Glad you found the tips useful! It's interesting how music lessons can reflect broader life skills, isn't it? Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts!
Oh man, the "Tick of Doom" and the "Attack the Problem" points are GOLD. I need to send this to all my young piano students (parents) just for these two if nothing else! I also need to apply most of this to myself...
Im a beginner that uses your piano course, thank you very much for that! My mom got used to play piano and it might be I took something from that in my childhood. Right now, at the same time with your lesson course, I am learning 'my heart will go on' using a simple 'push-to-play' visual guide that are a lot on TH-cam and when I play I actually listen to the sound and notice things that sound 'not right' (mainly because of my piano is pretty old and might not be in the best condition since it was never maintained).
You're welcome! Let me know how you get on with the course, and if there's anything I can help with. Yes, listening is absolutely key: listen closely and you'll progress quicker!
This is wonderful advice. I know multiple instruments and each instrument I still have a different song for each to warm up. 30 minutes and if I get it wrong well it's time to see what's going on lol. It's cool how you can just choose any note and make a scale then chords from that scale. Music feels free emotionally but the time is never free.
I just decided to leave my teacher and self teach. There is so much out there that I was getting confused. But your video was fantastic! It addressed most of my questions. I will definately check out your course. Thank you!
You're welcome, Donna - I'm glad it helped. If you have any specific questions or problems about anything in the course, give me a shout. It sometimes takes me a while to reply to comments, but I always get there in the end (and if I don't, remind me!)
I started playing Keyboard end of last year (and had it collect dust for some months since beginning of the year) and used your beginner lessons. I am 100% guilty of not mastering the basics before moving on. I still have struggle reading the notes, because I tend to go through the notes, learn and memorize which button comes next and where my hand has to be and then play that from memory. Also I rushed through the lessons a bit to get to a point where i can play/engage one or two songs i like, so my motivation does not go out the window again like in the beginning of the year. but now i actually have to learn the stuff i rushed through, because lesson 8 actually gives me some problems
The notorious lesson 8 strikes again! (It's lesson 9 for some people...). You do raise a very valid and important point about motivation, though: it's easy for me to say "work hard on the basics", but I guess the basics don't always feel like progress, and people need a feeling of progress to motivate themselves to keep going, right?
This is great! I was chugging along learning with a teacher then moved and found your channel and Patreon …But After a few years of fun but still a bit beginner, I had to take a pretty long hiatus for carpel tunnel surgery. I’m fully healed and probably stronger now but having a a nard time jumping back in. I can still site read book 1 stuff enough to play but really want to get back to improving. I now have a plan. Don’t jump into the deep end! Go back to beginning 😊
as a self taught adult piano hobby-ist, yes this rings a lot of bells #3. pushing past when it first sounds ok - could not agree more, that's when to try different tempos, different accents and rhythms, etc. #4. scales and exercises, the best exercise I ever did was play all of the first 20 Hanon Exercises in all twelve keys, both forwards and backwards. for months and months and months. In fact I am absolutely dumbfounded that Hanon didn't think to mention playing in other than the key of C, my fingers had an hard time accommodating the different heights of the white and black keys, and still do to some extent even after all those months and months and months of practice. #5. look at a recording of yourself a week or a month later
Believe me, by the standards of some of my learners late 60s is very young! Anyhow, I'm glad this video rang some bells for you. Let me know how you get on, and yes, please do try recording yourself. It can be very challenging (somehow everything gets weirdly harder the instant you hit "record"...) but it can be very, very useful.
The bad thing about being self-taught is you're gonna make mistakes, and you'll spend some time fixing them. The good thing about being self-taught is you're going though your own path - it might not be the most efficient one, but you're going to have so much fun. When I make comparison to someone trained (around my level), I noticed that while they know all scales, they don't have a clue what to do with them. I spent a year having fun in just one, and I know it inside out (chord progressions, the works). Now I can pick piece in any scale (takes me a minute to construct it first), and learning the piece amounts to a lot of "ok, I see what you're doing there" and just a few "hmm, interesting". I found triads way more useful - they are much more easier to memorize, they make it a breeze to find fourths and fifths and you can actually start playing something with them, so fun practice.
1. Répétition; over learning especially the foundation scales, sight reading even the easiest exercises. Practice regularly everyday not skipping then all at once. Isolate difficult measures-repeate 29 30 times; reinforcement is repetition. Give yourself time…work the practice schedule do not give up…be dedicated to learning at your level. ❤
A bit of an odd comparison maybe but: I used to record some of my matches from an online shooter game I play, and rewatching them actually really helped me get better and understand what I could improve and why. Like he said about recording yourself play to later look it over and learn from it.
lol I’m mostly self taught but I did go for a career as a keyboardist and educator. This validated a lot of the findings I had in my journey. Thanks for sharing!
The "its just pressing buttons" mentality really resonates with me as I started like that and only in recent years have I started to really listen and improvising stuff. Great video
Thank you, Jorge! Yes, it's a pretty major problem, and continues to be for almost all piano players - because the thing makes the sound for us it's easy to stop paying attention to the actually sounds...!
The tick of doom is a huge problem for me with my ADHD, I often end up rushing pieces so i can get to the next piece i want to learn so as soon as i get it right, i move on. I'm not even self taught and i barely have 3 pieces in my repertoire!!! New years res was to fix that asap
This is great- thank you! I just started sharing videos on my TH-cam channel in the hope of making music literacy accessible to all. Learning to read music opens up a whole new world for musicians.
You're welcome - and good luck with the channel. It's tougher to get started on TH-cam than it used to be, but it's worth sticking with: your content looks good!
I really appreciate this. My piano journey began when I was in grade school and my parents bought me a Magnus Chord Organ - you know - one of those wind-blown devices with a piano keyboard, and a bank of buttons for major and minor chords. It came with a book that included several pieces - the melody and the accompanying chords. From there, I went on to become a trumpet player. Trumpet playing lead me to an advanced school where I had to learn music theory. Music theory took me back to the keyboard, as. a way of 'cheating' my compositions. Now, with a real piano in my possession, I began to mimic popular/rock music. Some tunes I could parrot note-for-note. PROBLEM: I had NO formal piano teaching, and as such, my fingerings were obnoxious - blasphemous! Decades later, I attempted piano lessons. That lasted . . . not so much. Then, another twenty years later, I entered into college - a Recording Degree - and Basic Piano was required. I nailed that class! HOWEVER - to this day, there are few pieces I can legitimately play. I AM NOT A PIANIST! I used to have singers at church ask if I would accompany them. I would say, "Sure - if you give the music, and let me have about a month". LOL. You see - I don't really play "by ear" - play by ear in the sense that I hear the piece, and I can discern the chords. Then, I simply "work out" a useable piano arrangement that fits. That's my piano journey. Can I ever break through, and become a REAL pianist? I guess that depends on one's definition of "real".
Ive done a lot of learning about learning. And this might be the single greatest quick resource for an overview of common pitfalls Ive ever come across. This stuff applies across the board, and thats exactly the sort of body of knowledge I'm looking to identify and compile right now. This is damn near 10 commandments level.. Bravo!
I’m a self taught piano player of about 20 years and your points are so accurate! While I’ve been blessed with opportunities to play, in hindsight I think I would have been EVEN BETTER had I been taught by someone in my earlier years. It’s harder now for me to embrace being taught because I’ve made a lot of progress on my own (outside of me watching more videos since March 2021). Thanks for this video!
You have to keep humbling yourself to keep learning, I’m a Piano teacher to 60+ students every week and I still have lessons. I like to feel like an idiot and continue improving.
Bill, I retired at age 64 a few months ago and I just acquired a piano with the goal of learning in the months and years to come. I discovered your online course and I am plodding my way through it now. I found the 10 problems of self-taught pianists and wanted to say thank you. While I didn't expect this to be a quick endeavor, I appreciate the callout of the pitfalls we can experience as we go. I appreciate your presentation and I am hoping to use your course as my plan going forward. As an older learner I am struggling to learn the notes on the sheet music but I continue to work at it before pressing forward. Thanks again for your program!!
You're very welcome - also at 64 you're an absolute spring chicken by the standards of some people who follow the course, so I say make use of your youth and vitality! The thing with the notes and the sheets is just to keep plugging away: a little bit every day. Yes, kids learn it quicker, but you can learn it more reliably (and probably with a high chance of success) because of your extra maturity and life experience - it really does make a colossal difference. Good luck with the course, let me know how you get on, and do get in touch if you get stuck with any of it!
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For the tick of doom, I was taught something like 20 years ago: have six-sided dice on the piano. When I think I've mastered something, I test myself: put a die on 1. If you play it correctly, tick it up to 2. If you play it correctly, put it up to 3. If you play it incorrectly, put it down to 2.
If you're truly committed to this, then you're going to feel pressure and nervousness when you get up to 4 and 5, because you don't want to go backward. Being able to execute the passage up to 6 under this pressure and enough times in a row is a better indication of mastery than just "it feels pretty good." If you find yourself bobbling up and down in the 3-5 range, it's probably not as solid as you think.
Ahhhh, that's a good trick - I might borrow that, if you don't mind. Another good one is to video yourself: similar to the dice method, the slight extra pressure reveals problems in things you think you've done. Thanks very much for that!
The other issue is if you're going back and forth between two or three numbers, you're doing more harm than good because you're messing up roughly half the time. If this happens, stop, figure out why you're messing up, slow it down, and fix it.
epic
I’m going to try this suggestion today, thanks 😊
Back to 1, surely, you mean? If you go back only one step there isn’t enough pressure.
You are never too old to learn to play an instrument. I had never played a reed woodwind until I was 44 when I picked up an inexpensive clarinet, and it changed my life. I practiced 30, sometimes 40 hours a week and within a year I was better at it than I was on guitar which I had played for 20 years. The keys to success are passion, practice, and patience. The nice thing about being over 40 when you're learning something new, is that you probably realized by now that talent isn't just something you're born with. Talent is the result of practice and when you hear somebody with amazing talent, what you're really hearing is their hard work.
Can you share how'd you feel starting a new one? Like, how do you feel about the tone, the sound, the fact that you had to suck for so long 😉 just by nature of learning something new. I think about this sorta thing often, my body has thrown a wrench into my previous plans to sing or possibly play guitar. It's hard to have things taken away from us
And their passion, their inner self. All my life I have enjoyed listening to all kinds of music, but there are very few who have that 'extra something'. I love the sound of clarinet, an instrument with a special language, what pleasure you must have. Congratulations on your achievement.
Congratulations from me, too! People can and do make great progress over the age of 40 (and beyond). As you say, it's the realisation that it comes down to effort. I've found over the years that a lot of musicians don't like being described as "talented", because they feel it belittles the sheer hard work they've put in.
@@shaunreich I couldn't even get it to make a sound at first. But that first day I was discovering vibrato and over blowing, and within a month I was making my clarinet sound like a saxophone, or a trumpet. My tone was constantly evolving and it was great hearing the progress I was making. Especially the first 6 months, your improvements are super noticeable and week by week you are constantly getting better. I remember struggling with the upper register, and then a month later I could play the upper register without the register key. Your'e always chipping away at perfection.
@@BillHilton Very much so. Talent is the result of incredible feats of effort and will.
The part about having the unique learned ability of grit as an adult actually made me tear up and feel powerful. Having recently turned 24, you reminded me of how much I've progressed and i am grateful to you!
As a keyboard player, this popped up in my feed... But as a martial arts instructor, I realised that almost all of these tips apply to my students! So thanks very much, this is a useful list for both arts 🙂
Glad it was helpful, Gary! That's a really interesting angle, actually, and ties in with a lot of my recent thinking about these kinds of problems. I think there is a huge overlap between learning piano (or any instrument) and developing skill in any kind of sport or athletic activity. In fact, there's a huge body of research in the field of sports science which just hasn't been tapped into by musicians, even though so many of the problems and challenges are identical or near-identical. We've been pretty good at assimilating and using (and occasionally misusing...) psychological and neuroscientific research, but there's all this stuff sportspeople do, and the research into it, that could be really useful to us. I guess it comes down to the cultural gulf between the two fields. Anyhow, please do chip in with views from the martial arts world whenever you like, because I'll be very interested to hear them - even things like breathing and warm-ups and suchlike have huge cross-domain value.
I was just thinking to myself, earlier today, how learning the piano is like studying karate. Many similarities. Oss!
@@BillHilton Hi Bill. I finally got round to noting down the jiu jitsu version of your video. I'm going to post a link to your video on our facebook page with the notes if that's okay with you?
A tendency to race. Rushing through early classes might lead to later classes seeming unfeasibly hard, but allowing the earlier fundamentals to sink in will make the progress easier. Focus on mastering on what you’re doing now before rushing to the next technique.
Lack of direction. We all get excited about new techniques and students often try to soak in as many instructionals & funky techniques as youtube will allow. But without guided progress, they will not be coherent, you will not get as many repetitions, and will not become ‘subconsciously competent’. It’s also worth noting that different practitioners often prefer different variations of techniques which, at the beginner stages, may prove counter-productive.
The tick of doom. I often see in private and group classes the ‘got it, what’s next’ mentality. But all that’s happened is that you’ve progressed from ‘consciously incompetent’ (ie. you don’t know the technique) to ‘consciously competent’ (ie. you can do the technique if you’re thinking it through one step at a time). It it takes many repetitions to move that technique to being ‘subconsciously competent’ (ie. your body does the technique without you having to think about it). This is your goal, so push past the point at which you think you’ve mastered something and get your reps in. This is sometimes called ‘muscle memory’ and is what Bruce Lee was referring to when he said “I don’t fear the man who’s done a thousand techniques… I fear the man who’s done one technique a thousand times”.
Don’t skip the drills. It’s tempting to skip past the movement drills and focus on sparring, but the drills will make you better at sparring as your body finds the most efficient way to move. It’s less fun, but utterly necessary.
Not getting feedback. Make sure you’re either getting feedback from your coach, or videoing yourself to check details later with fresh eyes. A mistake repeated over and over can become ingrained and difficult to repair so get the habits right early.
Inefficient practice. Plan your practice time to have a goal, whether it’s drilling old techniques, or new ones rather than training without a goal.
Be aware of the ‘unknown unknowns’. When an instructor is teaching, he or she may sometimes assume some knowledge on the students part. A good instructor is happy to explain something they glossed over - remember, they may’ve been doing these techniques for decades and have forgotten what it felt like learning it for the first time, so watch out for stuff that isn’t obvious.
Try not to over-estimate your weaknesses and under-estimate your strengths. Self doubt can hinder your progress, and older students often have learnt to have ‘grit’ and understand that commitment will always create progress. Remember you have strengths too… A black belt is a white belt who never gave up!
Not doing enough reinforcement. Older students learn slower because they have less brain plasticity. But they also have the wisdom to realise that they shouldn’t be too hasty and it’s okay to repeat the basics until they’re properly bedded in.
Thinking being good at jiu jitsu is about the number of techniques you know. Jits is so much more than techniques, and when things like understanding body mechanics, points of base, leverage, how to distract your opponent, relaxing at the right time, and breathing are important, a smaller repertoire applied well can be more effective.
@garyking4032 That’s absolutely fine by me, Gary - I’d be grateful for a link when it’s live, as I’ll be interested in any discussion!
One nuance I would add to “The Tick of Doom” is that self-learners are generally more driven to learn a piece that inspires them, and they might show more vigilance and patience in getting it right. Whereas the guided learner is more at the whim of a course or objective-based approach to getting a project done. Most people have the tendency to expedite the finish, but the desire to not be rushed is an important key to avoiding the Tick of Doom.
Excellent! Very valuable insights there, and I can't really add anything of value, so I've hearted in the hope people will seem them take them on board. Thanks very much indeed!
Sometimes the little scaled-down pieces in a course can demolish the door that opens the same music in a more complicated form. It is possible to play a piece by Chopin? Heavenly!
They say It isn't easy to teach an old dog new tricks. I'm over 60 and it's even more challenging when you have an old dog trying to teach an old dog new tricks! I've been using your tutorials for over two years and they have been so helpful. You are a clever guy and an excellent teacher and I greatly appreciate having free access to such high quality instruction
Regarding number 3, I've heard the difference between amateur and professional musicians is that amateurs will practice until they get a piece correct, while professionals will practice until they can't get a piece wrong.
Yes indeed, Jack - that's a fairly common expression! You need to be a bit careful, though, because it can lead you down a rabbit hole of perfectionism that leads to diminishing returns, and spending time trying to achieve the final 0.1% of perfection on one piece which you could be using to achieve the 80% of "good" on another. (Also in my experience pros have definitions of "wrong" that vary by context: for a concert violinist in the recording studio, there can be no "wrong" at all; for a piano player in a jazz club a lot of "wrong" won't even get noticed by the audience, so the goal is to practice so you can reliably produce something musical and listenable, but not necessarily technically perfect).
I was getting frustrated with my progress on piano, so I took a break and found this video - which made me realize that I'd jumped ahead much too far without properly honing the essentials. I've now settled down to working through lesson two of your course, and already feel like I have a better understanding of where my skills are really at, and what I need to focus on to get better. Thanks for helping set me straight, and for the incredibly useful course you've put up!
I just want to say THANK YOU ! I don't think people, including myself, thank people like you enough for taking of their precious time to share their knowledge with us. Thanks so much again!
You're welcome, Nelson - really glad you found it useful!
Excellent point about the tick of doom! I had a drum teacher who told me that the brain commits things to long-term and muscle memory by doing things correctly repeatedly - lots of times, over a long time period. Therefore, that one iteration of playing something perfectly really should be the beginning of the final step towards mastery (and might be somewhat of an accident).
All good points, and it also applies to saxophone. (my instrument of choice.)
One comment on brain elacity: adult are usually more results driven, and averse to experimentation. Allow yourself some leeway in your schedule to play freely, to make mistakes, to goof up, but enjoy the process. Then return to your scales.
Your brain learns better when you're relaxed and 'safe', than when you're feeling frustrated, and your muscles are tense. I've experienced this over and over again.
Excellent points, Jeroen - thanks very much for adding them!
Think it is important for a beginner to be able to play chords as soon as possible. You can then accompany yourself while doing scales and simple note progressions. Much easier and more pleasant to practice scales when you have an accompaniment and you may get some feeling for the quality of sound as well.
Many beginners are put off the piano because they are obliged to learn to read music as well as learning the keyboard patterns: a bit like expecting a toddler to learn reading as well as uttering first words, at the same time. In other words, beginners will be put off learning if they do not experience some degree of melody in the early stages.
Your course is traditional and excellent but many people do not have the patience to do all the learning of reading and playing before they eventually attain their first experience and reward of chord and note harmony.
I was in a music shop some time ago and I noticed there were no student books beyond grade 5. When I asked why, the response was that most of the pupils never went beyond this level. Too much store is often placed on exam learning instead of enjoyment of music.
I am an old learner and I think your course is excellent. However, I learned chord progressions from another course and I can now approach your in depth lessons with greater appreciation of the rewards to come.
This is insightful and has many parallels to teaching oneself a foreign language (I'm a linguist and have studied and also experienced this). In particular, one has to avoid the "tick of doom" and continue practicing on easy material (we call it "comprehensible input") to reinforce the foundations while also pressing on to new material. And I suppose grammar study is the equivalent of scales -- can't do without it!
Thanks Michael! I actually thought about including the parallels between piano and language learning in this tutorial, and it might appear in another one sometime soon (my wife is a linguist and my first degree was English, so we discuss language a lot in these parts…). You’re exactly right, though, because grammatical structures learned thoroughly in the same way one learns eg scales really stick with you: I can still chant German article tables that I first learned when I was 13, in 1987 or thereabouts. Der die das die den die das die des der des der dem der dem den…!
I am almost 63 years of age and I started learning piano just two months ago. I am not self-taught; I have a teacher and I regularly take classes, but I can immediately relate to every one of your points. Thank you for making this video, it makes me aware of 10 potential pitfalls in my piano journey.
You're very welcome - I'm glad it helped. Good luck with your learning!
You are never too old to fail, and learning to play piano is a great way to remind you
🤣
Great video.
The Tick of death: Remembering something and internalizing it are too different things.
Stopping after a mistake and starting over again: Wait till you train yourself and do that live, in front of people. You also have to learn how to roll through mistakes and keep going.
You have nailed the essence here. I've been recording my self-learning progress for 4 years now and I can say with confidence - EVERYTHING you say is true and I think it is just happening to everyone. When I started I assumed I would be playing "decent simple jazz" in 2 years. Well, I'm into 4th year now and I know I still need some 2 years to reduce tensions feel comfortable and not think about "theory" while playing. Kudos to everyone who starts after 40! I have utmost respect for such people because I understand what it takes. Thanks Bill for all the hard work you are doing!
You’re welcome Adrian, thanks for the kind words, and kudos indeed to everyone who starts after 40! I feel very strongly that too many older learners get disheartened early on and drop out unnecessarily - if we can reduce the number that do we get more people having more fun playing the piano, plus all the other benefits that it brings (cognitive health, mental health etc etc etc). So I plan to keep plugging away on this stuff 😂
I’m an after 40 learner. And I decided to learn it when I saw some after 60 learner doing it. I thought, well, in 20 years I would probably play better. It’s never too late! 🙂
@limavalepy that’s the spirit - exactly the right attitude. Good luck!
@@limavalepy I chose jazz as my "mission impossible" and I'm sure now that 10 years of sustained effort is enough time to be able to play anything and any level. All is relative though. Bear in mind that all the masters also played simple things. Music is not about virtuosity and showmanship. At least for me - it is about expression of what is inside me and only me. This is how I understand those things 🙂
Number 8 and 9 put me in a spell of depression for the past months.
I'm finally out of it before new years and I've gotten more consistency with my playing since then.
So now I run into your video and it's all of the things I needed to hear. I'm thankful for the algorithm god for making your video pop up. I'm even more determined this year to finally be back to an energized state of wanting to further my piano skills.
Good to hear it helped, Laura - I hope the algorithm god keeps smiling on you in 2024. Needless to say, if you run into any problems or have any questions, just give me a shout!
40 year old beginner here. Been doing the piano adventures books. Interestingly enough…coming from being a metal guitarist…i actually have a fetish for scales and arpeggios, and I have to force myself away from constant technical practice and work through learning the pieces in the book.
It's a very odd thing, Brad, but scales and arpeggios can be incredibly addictive, especially once you get into the habit of pursuing the (unattainable) goal of perfect evenness. They're the afternoons in the local garden centre of playing piano: I used to hate them when I was a kid, but now I actively look forward to them. Anyhow, that's good: it'll make a massive difference to your fine motor control, theory knowledge and reading skills. Keep it up, you're doing great!
@@BillHilton thank you so much! Love your videos!
Very interesting video and there are certainly a lot of gold nuggets if you watch this through the end.
Personally I found the better way to get past 'the tick of doom' is to practice differently.
So as an example: You know a lick or riff, now play it backwards, play it in groups of 3 or more notes, play it slower, play it to another meter, transpose it, and so on.
This is method is better than, practice it another 30 times, and you internalize the lick or riff much better, plus it's more challenging and fun!
Thank you! Heart for this comment so plenty of other people can read it - that’s a very good tip. Thanks for sharing!
Hello. I'm just starting out. Bought a digital piano approx 1 month ago. I am satisfied with my progress (watching videos and trying to teach myself). I have to say, yours is the best series of instructions for complete beginners that I have come accross on the internet. Thank you so much for your video instructions. I am in no hurry to rush through the lessons. I am taking my time, and trying to develop new technicial skills at age 67. Thanks again for great lessons!
You're really welcome, and thanks for the kind words - it's always good to hear when my stuff is helping people. Let me know how you get on: 67 is actually quite young relative to some of the learners I hear from (!) so if you go at it steadily you should have the potential to do well. And shout if you have any questions at any stage!
A little tip for anyone searching for a good pathway after finishing the Beginner's course: There are several certified piano courses that have downloadable pdfs for their syllabus. In this way, you can progress through certain 'levels' of skill, by learning pieces, etudes, rhythm exercises, musical hearing exercises, etc. These levels of course prepare you for some form of official examination, but nothing is stopping you for using these syllabuses(syllabi?) as clear milestones for your own progression. I went with the Canadian standard (RCM), but there are several others (ABRSM, Henle).
I am a self-taught piano player and composer and have been playing since I was a little kid (I’m in my mid-60s now). Over the years I had to move primarily into composing because of career and family demands and practice time was less necessary in order to get good results. Now I’m trying to resurrect my technic and it’s proving to be daunting. Motivation is the issue. However, I keep remembering Benjamin Franklin’s (an autodidact) words: “He who is self-taught hath a fool for a teacher.” It’s good to get input from another source and reduce the foolishness a little. Thanks for the video.
You're very welcome, Mike! If any of this helps you composition work, please let me know (I'd love to hear it!)
@@BillHilton I can’t help but think that improving my technic will help my composition - especially the way I go about it using a DAW and software and hardware synths. Here’s a link to one of my pieces (thanks for asking): th-cam.com/video/pTa983LqdU8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=EfnzryNCjdXo0-tp
Its true self learners tend to not have a direction, but I am not sure it is always bad. Its bad if you are misjudging how much you know thats for sure, but if you are practicing stuff you like and you are pushing yourself you will integrate your knowledge in a much more natural way. I have friends who have been trained in muscic school and yet didn't rememeber how chirds are formed. Its fine to just know the chord but knowing why we refer to that chord as a minor and not major or the oposite is also important.
As a decent guitar player who started playing piano 14 years ago at age 55, I am pretty much familiar with your suggestions. Another thing that has cost me a lot of time on the piano however is that when I started, knowing a lot of music, I decided I would play only what I wanted to play. I started with Maple Leaf Rag and taught myself to read the sheet music. I got the notes under my fingers in a couple of months but I had problems getting a good sound. But I persevered. And persevered. And persevered. What I should have done was to also study other things. When I finally started doing that the Maple Leaf Rag actually got better. Eventually I finally got books to learn scales. When I don't feel like attacking the fine points of music, I can always plug myself into scales. And finally, metronome, metronome, metronome.
Wish I would have started all those things sooner!
Thank you for your videos. I have been teaching keyboardists in pur church but I had a massive debilitating stroke 3 years ago. Now I send new musicians your lessons to prepare them. I usually teach shortcuts to making the chords and becoming very versatile to play any worsip song and how to improvise. Your videos cover all thàt. Thank you very much. God bless you for your generosity in sharing your talent and ideas.
I'm a self taught guitar player of almost 20 years but ive always been more captivated by piano music and get the best advice from piano players like in this video. I think I will join you goobers very soon.
You'll be very welcome - feel free to hit me up with any questions/problems you run into 👍
This is very good advice! I'd like to add something from a more holistic perspective, to do with brain health and learning.
Firstly, general health affects your brain function, so...
- Nutrition
- Exercise
- Sleep
Secondly, sleep is when memory consolidation occurs. Your brain can only hold so much new information before it gets tired. Don't try to learn too much in one day. Aim for only one new thing, practice it, sleep, then practice it again the next day to make sure it stuck before moving on to the next new thing.
Thirdly, and this one may seem a bit weird, but it worked for me after more than one failed attempt at learning to play the piano... If you have a mentally taxing job that involves different things each day and a lot of thinking, you're already pushing the limits of your brain's learning and memory capacity. After work I was tired and had trouble focusing on anything for more than a few minutes. I'm not an early bird so practicing before work was a no go. What I did was sleep for one to three hours straight after work (no alarm, just woke naturally) to give my brain a chance to recharge, then I had a meal and did my piano practice before going to bed properly and sleeping for another five to six hours. I naturally have a biphasic sleep pattern so this worked very well for me.
This is really interesting - thanks very much! The stuff about sleep is tremendously interesting - there’s quite a lot of stuff in the research literature about successful musicians tending to sleep a lot, especially in their years of most in their years of most intense training. Thanks again!
I started your beginner course two weeks ago, now im in ep 7, thank you for doing these free lessons, it is helping me a lot. Im from Brazil and learning english and music at the same time is such a great experience, thank you so much Bill Hilton 🙏🇧🇷.
You're really welcome! I've had several really dedicated learners from Brazil, including one guy who started the course using a hand-drawn keyboard on a piece of paper. Glad to hear you're getting through the course: let me know how you get on, and if you run into problems!
@@BillHiltonlearning in a piece of paper is madness, but im sure he got that. and yes ill write my problems and my evolution down there, hope you see it later.
Thanks Bill for the video. Good to see you in the garden! I think your 10 suggestions are very pertinant. Another problem I’ve only just identified after feedback is that I wasn’t playing in time. I now use a metronome and try to count out loud - big improvement. Also play slowly and accurately. I’ve found your videos really helpful during my piano journey. Thanks again. About to subscribe to Patreon. Regards Peter
I am currently running through the beginner course. After over 35 years of messing around with synthesizers I finally decided to learn how to play properly. It is excellent. Your advice is spot on.
I love the fact that I stumbled upon your channel! I have been playing guitar for decades. After getting a piano for my son, I started building chords on the piano myself and it "clicked" for me how they are actually built. After some contact with the piano, I can look at a chord name and immediately play it, even a complicated chord is fine. I was thinking of learning it even more deeply and am really glad that someone is giving us so much insight into this learning experience.
Thank you, and I'm glad you like it! I've been doing this for more than ten years now, and I've really come to realise in the past year or so that covering the learning experience (and the learning _process_) is as important as dealing with all the technical stuff. So there's more like this to come!
So many of these mistakes resonated! I am self teaching and I have gone 3 weeks now. Reinforcement is my issue and many times I simply focus on getting the note correct that I ignore the tempo.
My son, Alex, has gone off to university and I have always wanted to learn and play the piano and it's great company.
You are an excellent teacher. Thank you.
You're welcome, Debbie-Ann, and thanks for the kind words! Let me know how you get on, and also if you have any questions. It sometimes takes me a little while to reply (I get a lot of comments...) but I always do!
My digital piano arrived today and had a free 3-month subscription to Skoove. I've been holding off trying it because it seems more like you're matching buttons on a screen than really learning.
I feel like this applies to all self taught musicians. I learn the classical guitar and this video has been extremely useful.
That’s good to hear - glad it was helpful!
I'm a lifelong self learner. I use pyramidal microlearning. Switch angles, often, so practise various skills, rotate, also blend in pleasure parts. EG sometimes technical and straight, sometimes let loose even with mistakes, builds a different kind of flexibility especially with genres that allow it like blues. Switch, rotate, vary, repeat, enjoy, sweat, curse, rejoice, cherish.
Interesting - both to hear your approach and to hear from someone who thinks so carefully about the learning process (…often the hallmark of successful learners…). I’m very interested in micro learning in general, but could you maybe expand on the “pyramidal” aspect of that? Is it to do with prioritisation?
@@BillHilton what I mean by pyramidal is circling large circles through various aspects but rotating fast enough so as not to get stuck. With enough momentum one would rise through levels and need run shorter circles as in a cone rather than a pyramid if you wish. It does need speed and efficacy. I do think about it deeply as I play piano for producing my own music which requires multiple instruments for composition plus mixing so I'm circling several cones at once. Tough but fantastic.
@@antoinebunel that’s tremendously useful - thanks. I’m going to dig into that more deeply!
I'm 66 and have been playing off and on most of my life. But I feel I've reached a point where I don't get any better or play more complex. Non-musicians think I'm good but I know how much better I could be. On a scale of 1-10, I'd put myself at a 3, and I know if I focused on a course, I could reach 6-7. Maybe I'll give your course a go. I'm retired, just had a kidney removed, so time is definitely not an issue. If I start now, by the time I'm 70, I could be quite good in the eyes, and ears, of other musicians.
Give it a try and let me know how you get on! I would say, by the way, that you may be underwriting yourself - if other people think you're an eight and you think you're a three, the truth, may line somewhere in between… Good luck with your recovery!
The "tick of doom" issue also involves keeping playing what you think you have mastered, for a few days. Or at least check that you can play it as comfortably the next day, and the day after. It always takes time (and sleep) to process something and get it in your long term memory where it feels that you can play it without thinking (feels like "muscle memory").
Absolutely! I'm glad you mentioned sleep, as many people forget or don't realise what an essential part of the learning process it is.
Great advice. Particularly isolating a problem bar and then re-integrating it, and keeping on playing previous pieces. Those are probably good advice for a lot of things.
I would only add 'Enjoy your music.' Music is a fundamental ingredient in our lives, walking in time to the beat, humming while doing the housework etc. don't make it a drudgery, practising isn't a punishment, it's a path to progress.
One more here. Just turned 40 and got to myself a keyboard, getting here in a few days and will start trying your videos. I love music but never played anything before.
As a 63 year old trying to learn to play the piano, I've found your advice extremely helpful. I can relate to everyone of the points you've mentioned and those points are probably the reason why I didn't succeed in my two previous attempts. I'll try your free course for a start... Thank you very much for your videos
You’re very welcome - good luck and let me know how you get on!
Not learning piano, here; just picking up the guitar after decades of not playing, and your insights have given me some valuable lessons on moving forward when I thought I hit a wall. Thank you!
You’re welcome! I guess a lot of this stuff is applicable across domains…!
Tendancy to race ...... my biggest sin! 🙂Great video you did!
Thanks Andreas - glad you liked it!
I love when you play a Chord 1-3-5. But. If you start with a major third, shift it to a minor third (even if it's not allowed).
Or vice versa. Shift the minor third to a major. Make sure you play the 1 &5.
Aww sounds so good. Works inverted too.
Thank you, Bill, it rang every bell. I am a teacher myself and the more I teach, the more I wish my piano teachers from the past had taught me about good practice technique. I now find that more and more of the lessons I give are about the exact things you talk about. And I try to make sure that when I am practising myself, I don't fall back into the (bad) habits of the past. I am going to share your video with my teenage and adult students - thank you so much for your clear exposition and your intelligent solutions.
You're welcome! I've had one or two teachers comment on this video and say bells were rung - I guess it shows how universal the problems are!
I've been self-teaching since late 2020, with about a year of in-person lessons from a teacher sprinkled throughout. There are many great points in this video, but I'd also like to share some of my own experiences and what really helped me. The biggest piece of advice I can offer to any beginner is to _be consistent._
There's a reason piano teachers often tell you to practice 15 or 30 minutes every single day. It's easy to maybe think "oh, well if I just practice for 2.5 hours once a week that's just as good." No, no it isn't. Long practice is fine! You should do long practice if you believe it will help you! But you also need to have consistent reinforcement, every single day, of things you've learned.
There would be times where I'd be trying to pick up something new one day, probably before even going to bed, and after 30 or so minutes I just can't wrap my head around it, can't get my hands or fingers to listen to me. No matter what I do I just can't seem to get it down. I could sit there for another hour until I get it, but that doesn't mean I've even learned it. So after that half hour, I just say screw it, and go to sleep. The very next morning, I go to practice that, and suddenly it is much easier. It's still not perfect, but I can _hear and tell and feel_ that it is beginning to make sense.
Consistency is super important. It's not so much about how _long_ you practice, but how often you reinforce that. Some days when I have nothing going on, I may practice something for half an hour, go do something else for several more hours, then go back to the piano and try it again. The point is, you need to be consistently learning, and this doesn't necessarily mean playing stuff you can _already_ play. It just means focusing on the things you know you struggle with.
Additionally, in terms of scales and exercises, I ended up developing many of my own inventions and exercises. I mostly did this by taking things I could already play, and coming up with new ways to play them. A very common thing I like to do is try combining left hand chords or arpeggios from one piece, and figuring out how to combine it with a right hand melody for something entirely different. This takes awhile, and often requires me to figure out (by ear) how to transpose the different parts into different keys so they work together harmonically. But this specific approach to traditional exercises trains _many different aspects all at once._
You should still absolutely play scales, go through the traditional exercises too. But don't be afraid to get creative and noodle around. The exercises I developed is what actually helped me develop my ear, I also developed a very good sense of rhythm (as I often had to mish mash things of different rhythms together), and I learned of intervals long before I even knew what they were. I started to notice loads of patterns, the relationships between notes, etc and realized I can use that to figure out how to play things by ear.
By the time I started taking lessons, there was a surprising amount of beginner stuff I already knew. And what's crazy is, this even translated to learning sheet music. I was sitting there painfully trying to read things note for note, and then I said to my teacher "wait a minute, it's not really about the notes, it's more about the gaps between them, right? that's how people get really fast at reading music, isn't it?" and she said "yeah actually, you can just see the gaps and know how far apart they are."
Another very important thing is to break the stuff you learn down into chunks. Before I even knew what phrases were, I was already doing this instinctively. When learning something new, whether by ear or by following sheet music, I would always chunk it by phrases. By doing this, you can break away from the habit of playing from the top when you hit a mistake.
I would learn a phrase, then learn the next phrase, and then play just a bit of the end of the first phrase to get used to transitioning into the next one. Instead of hitting a spot that might be hard and force me to restart, I would just instinctively restart on where that error occurred. Surprise surprise, this was almost always in the transitions between phrases.
This was also something my piano teacher was surprised I had no trouble with. When I would hit an error, when I'd anticipate I was just about to hit the wrong note, I'd stop and hit the right note. If the timing was off, I'd start over that one singular bar and repeat it until the timing was right, etc.
This is brilliant - thank you very much indeed for taking the time to share it. I can go on about this kind of thing as long I like, but when people hear it from fellow learners I think it really hits home. Much appreciated!
Talent is already knowing the most optimal ways to learn
@@cyrusthe0ther795 I'm not so sure about that, I by no means would say I am more or less talented than anyone else. It's just practice. LOTS of practice, even if it's ineffective, is still better than NO practice or not enough effective practice. Some may argue otherwise, but I disagree.
The first time I started self-teaching, I got a cheap 4 octave MIDI keyboard. The goal with this was to see if I could even get my hands and fingers to listen to me.
By day 2, I was able to play broken chords, play quarter note chords in the left hand and half note chords in the other, and I even developed a simple progression to go along with it. Technique was awful, I just kept my fingers locked in one position on both hands, and moved the hands around to the spots the needed to be in for those chords.
The point is, I was able to reach this after many many hours of literally doing nothing but playing, finding things to play, and following some exercises here and there. Ineffective practice? Yes. But I think this gave me a much better start with the piano than if I started with formal lessons from the get-go.
Another thing I want to mention is the...I guess insincerity of popular piano videos on TH-cam? People see things like this, especially "progress" videos, or see things like "I learned this in 3 days", and they think they may be able to do it too, and don't at all get a real picture of the sheer time investment.
The hard reality is, that person who said they learned something in 3 days? They're technically telling you the truth, but what they didn't show you were the dozens of hours of slowly learning and memorizing it, in addition to the 67 recordings they made where they kept screwing up. I know that _this_ is the behind-the-scenes nobody bothers to show you, because that's the behind-the-scenes for me.
They showed you the one take where it was good. If you told that person to play that same exact selection of music right now, I guarantee you they'd screw up and start over. That means they haven't learned it, they still have _much_ more to go with familiarizing themselves with that music.
It's really just about how much time you're willing to invest into it. I built up lots of familiarity with the piano long before I even took lessons. And the only reason I wanted lessons in the first place is because I realized the only way I'd know for sure I've been doing stuff right is to see what a teacher says about it.
@@spartan456 I was just commenting on how you found methods on your own that were effective. Justin Sung a youtuber who teaches proper study techniques, talked about talent just being people innately following effective learning habits. If you can learn them though then there is no difference between you and someone with talent. To me complementing on talent isn't a compliment and if anything is should be used to bring someone down by discrediting their work.
What do you mean by making your fingers listen to you?
@@cyrusthe0ther795 Oh, that's actually really fascinating! I never really thought of talent like that before, that makes a lot of sense though.
By "making my fingers listen to me", what I mean is the struggling nature of first trying to play the piano. More often than not, this is the hardest part for beginners. They'll know the next note they have to play is a C, they'll know the 2nd finger in their right hand is on the C, but when they have to play that C they'll maybe play a B on their first finger, or a D on their 3rd finger, etc. Hell, maybe their brain will throw them a real curveball and tell them "move your whole hand, we're going to a new key."
It gets even more confusing when you incorporate your other hand. You got 2 wrists and 10 fingers to keep track of, (and feet, too, when you start using pedal) and you gotta do all of this in a certain amount of time. For a lot of people, it's a kind of overload I guess. A really common thing you'll see on many piano videos is "how TF do I play this with both hands?"
This is something that just naturally gets easier as you mechanically familiarize yourself with the geography of the piano, and this is one of the many reasons traditional scale exercises are so fundamental. Half the time you spend learning some new music, it's gonna be memorizing the fingerings and locking that in.
Scale and key exercises sort of act like a training bicycle. If you learn Bb Melodic Minor and can run through it with your eyes closed, then next time you see music in Bb, well, you'll kind of already know how to work with those notes. It won't take nearly as much time to work out fingerings, because you've already been there.
I have the opposite of the "Tick of doom". I love the experience of playing music, but I'm not that excited about the learning process. So last time I tried to learn (as a teenager), I would spend 10% of my practise time working on learning a new thing and 90% just playing all the stuff that I've learned already. None of it perfect though, and I didn't feel like I was making further progress even though I could often hear my mistakes.
That’s an interesting one, because you’ve made a point that I thought about including! The temptation to play rather than practise is a pretty major problem for pianists at all levels (including me) - so it’s not just teenage you that ran into this! Personally, I only think I’ve started practising really effectively since I’ve been an adult, and in fact probably past the age of thirty or so. It’s only since then that I’ve really had the grit to consistently challenge myself with stuff I find difficult (obviously I did do it as a kid, but nowhere near as consistently and efficiently as I could have done…!)
the tick of doom gets me with training exercises all the time. Especially simple (ish) exercises. I get the fingering in my head and move on before I've really built the muscle memory
Yep, it's a very common problem, and you have to keep fighting the urge - that's my experience anyway, because half of these things, I still have to watch out for in my own practice…!
I really need to work on number 5. I’m mostly self taught on piano, but had classroom lessons on different instruments and music theory. Since I regularly play with normal people listening I get an abundance of positive feedback. But, I haven’t sat down with an expert to get more constructive feedback in over a decade. And even then it wasn’t really a “Here’s how you can get better” it was just “You passed the class/test”
Half the challenge is finding the right kind of expert, Jonathan, because good musicians often have trouble seeing things from the perspective of learners. An actual experienced teacher is probably your best bet, and even then it helps if it’s someone who is used to teaching adults and doesn’t just approach them like they’re big kids, if you see what I mean. But if you can find such a teacher and actually physically sit down with them at a piano, you’ll find it makes a huge difference. Just last week I played some bits of Bach and Brahms for a friend of mine who’s a much, much better classical player than me, and got twenty solid minutes of really invaluable advice that has already improved my playing. So it’s definitely worth bending over backwards to sort out. Let me know how you get on!
Okay. I’m convinced. Now 78 years old and totally back to basics after starting out many decades ago. A lot of what you say is me…I have drifted from to many tube lessons and never settled on one. Thing is I don’t have a piano as such. It’s an organ.. a real nice vintage sit up and beg with all the bells and whistles. Love it. Technique I’m sure will be different but the basics the same. I shall join your classes Bill but there will be a break as I’m off on some travels.
A year and a half ago I used your beginner tutorials to get into the basics. I still play one of the basic pieces. However I realized I was getting bored with the path. I took time to learn some basic music theory which helped immensely. I also began allotting time to improvisation: thoughful play where I chose a key and played whatever chords/melodies while focusing on what I was doing, and then creative play where I just played what sounded nice without worrying about what or why I was doing things. Combined with more practical lessons, I found myself becoming more attuned to the instrument and enjoying the sounds and pattern I was discovering.
Thank you for helping me learn enough to enjoy the piano. Now is a good time to revisit your videos and fill in some gaps in my current knowledge and technique.
I'm glad to hear my stuff has helped! It's interesting that the way you found of making progress involved working with several different strands and also building in creativity and theory. Increasingly I think the key for self-teachers is building in variety and exploration to help stay engaged. I hope you continue to do well, and please don't hesitate to give me a shout if you ever run into any problems or have any questions.
Thanks Bill. I'm 72 and have been working at your For Beginners course for a year now. Before I started your course my music education stopped in primary school, but I'm happy now to be able to read music and pick out some simple tunes. Keep up the good work!
You're welcome, and thanks for the kind words! I'm glad to hear the course is working, and I hope you continue to make progress. 72 is on the young side compared to some of the learners I've seen make progress, so you should have lots of room for development yet. Good luck, and get in touch if I can help in any way!
Bill, I take hope from a story about Pablo Casals who when asked why he continued to practice his cello at the age of 90 said because I'm noticing some improvement. Would love to chat longer but I must get back to the piano. Cheers to you Bill!
Tick of doom: Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong.
From my pov, there shouldn’t be any “until”. We should just practice forever.
@@trantrungnghia9642 Sadly, reality forces you to make some compromises. The worst is when a passage needs more work but you notice that each repetition is worse than the last. You have to stop and revisit later as simply continuing will make it worse.
Actually I start by practicing so slow that I get it right every time and because the muscle memory is ingrained it's much faster then practicing fast until you get it right.
@jack-ju1ft That is ideal. Still, I run into some things where I have to make decisions on fingering. So I try the various options a few times and want to make sure I don't choose one that won't work at performance tempo. Then the repetitions are about making sure I actually follow my chosen fingering.
@@karlrovey yes I usually do one hand and choose my fingerings before doing a section really slow
Great video. My daughter bought me your book for Christmas years ago and I never got beyond the opening page. Most of what you say here is about me. I have some decisions to make about how seriously I am going to be about finally learning the piano in a thoughtful way. Thanks for opening my 80 year old eyes. Regards and thanks for your great work.
You're very welcome, Bobby, and thank your daughter for buying my book! By all means give me a shout with any questions you happen to have if you decide to press ahead: I'm increasingly taking an interest in older learners and trying to build up some kind of body of knowledge about the most effective ways of helping them. So hearing about people's experiences is always useful!
@@BillHilton thanks, Bill.
Hello, I am 70 years old and trying to learn Piano now. Well, I did some Jazz-Clarinete, but Piano is a different thing. I am very happy to come across your "Piano Self-Teacher Problems". That makes me avoid a lot of them. Knowing myself, of course I would have fallen in some of these traps. Thank you so much.
You’re very welcome! If you find yourself facing any specific problems or you want guidance at any point, please don’t hesitate to ask - it sometimes takes me a little while to reply, but I always like to help if I can.
That's really very kind of you. At the moment I'm working on the bass clef, which I have to learn. As a beginner, you have a lot of questions, but I'm exploring what I can solve myself by studying. However, my clear goal is to learn jazz piano. Free improvisation and knowing how to use the right chords. But first and foremost comes the practice routine. If only there was a video that showed you a daily practice routine to make your finger muscles more flexible.@@BillHilton
I've been playing piano (badly) for around 40 years and this is the first time I've heard of the "push past" / tick of doom thing, which makes perfect sense to me. Thanks, great video.
You're very welcome! I coined the expressions myself, but the idea - especially push-past - is an old, old one that I first learned (from a guitar teacher, actually) when I was about 14.
Great advice, even for advanced players who are inevitably self-teaching much of the time! We still have unknown unknowns.
Foe me, my biggest booster on my learning has been to play keys on a pop/rock band. That has helped quite a lot with rhythm, listening to other people instruments, complement them and knowing that you need to continue, even if you make a mistake. Fast recovery from that is crucial on a band. Show must go on!. I am about five and a half years on my playing journey and one year and a half playing on the band. We have done so far five gigs and have another one in a week. We rehearsal weekly, also a very important thing.
Playing in public, in general, is also a real booster. I have been playing any piano I can play on any venue, from stations to hotels. And I am just a beginner. But people enjoy it if there is passion on your playing. Don't be shy, communicate your inner music by playing to people. The first time I got an applause I joyfully cried. I was less than two years playing back then, and it was a humbling event.
This is a really excellent insight, Jose - thanks very much indeed. Any kind of playing with a band, or public playing, is hugely beneficial. I hope you continue to make good progress!
Excellent video, I teach piano and see these all the time with my youtube-taught students. The button pressing mentality in particular is a curse
Thanks Eleanor - you're the second music teacher to come along in the past couple of days and say this rings bells, so I'm really glad I seem to have landed on the right set of problems. Over the past year or so I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about this whole nexus of opportunities/difficulties that exist around self-teaching: on the one hand, TH-cam offers great opportunities to learners, especially adults, who don't have the time/inclination/funds to work with a teacher, but at the same time it presents this whole set of challenges with feedback, planning, direction and so on, many of which won't be obvious to a beginner who has just got hold of a digital piano for a few hundred pounds/euros/dollars and is trying to make sense of it by themselves. Anyhow, I'm always really interested to hear opinions from working teachers, so please do feel free to chip in whenever you like!
Taking a video of oneself practicing was a great idea! Immediately spotted a postural error that is most likely behind the ache that I keep getting in my right arm after practicing a little while. Thank you!
You're welcome! Yes, it's a really simple thing to do but it can make an amazing difference!
Yup! Every one of these points, esp. #1. I'm addicted to the piano but had fairy tale expectations.
You aced it Bill. Every one is winner. I'm a different kind of late beginner. Played guitar, mandolin, mandola, banjo and viola in every style from A to Z. Played in an orchestra as an adult doing classical mandola, so some of the beginner piano stuff is not hitting home for me. I quite like scales and know what I need to do. However at my age lessons are expensive and the clock is ticking. Of course I'm falling into a lot of the traps, but will take your advice on board.
Glad you liked it Phil - I don’t get many mandola players commenting: I imagine it’s a pretty challenging instrument in its own right (I’ve only ever tried mandolin).
Most important message about learning piano I've seen. Having been taught properly and now recapping in later life all these issues ring true. Feel like I have a teacher again. Thank you. I'm not convinced you can learn piano alone or online at all. There are a lot of used digital pianos for sale in barely played condition. It's tough.
Thanks Rob! I think it is possible to succeed as a self-teacher - I’ve seen people do it - but it’s not easy, and I’d guess that the majority who set out don’t make it. That people’s definitions of “learn piano” vary: some just want to play enough to be able to handle a few of their favourite songs, while others want to learn to a professional level.
Thank you for the information in this video. Playing for
You’re welcome, Sue - I’m glad to have helped! Over the past year or two I’ve started to get very interested in how older learners make progress, so give me a shout if you have any questions/need any help. (Not that 68 is very old - I regularly hear from learners in their eighties and nineties…!)
Im a guitarist, now songwriter and recording my own demos has been the greatest blessing to my improvement as a musician. It motivates me to learn what’s in my head.
I’m not going to leave that vocal run or piano fill out of the song, because it’s too hard.
Thanks for that, Jeffrey - I often struggle to persuade people how useful recording onesself can be, so it's great to hear that it's worked for you!
All so true Bill. As a selfteaching pianoplayer I recognize everything you say so I wrote down all 10 problems and printed them as a reminder. Many thanks!
After seeing this, I realise I do all the 10 things mentioned in the video. However, I'd say that my take from it is not to race, get more feedback, and listen more while playing. Thanks a lot, this was very helpful.
Thank you, thank you! I’m 76 and have decided to be serious about actually learning how to play. It’s more difficult than I’d anticipated it being and I often forget what I had just done well yesterday. Your tips and words of encouragement couldn’t have come at a better time! Thanks again!
You’re really welcome, Joni - let me know how you get on, and give me a shout if you have any questions. It sometimes takes a while for me to reply but I try to get around to everyone…!
@@BillHilton Thank you, I may do that! Have a very fine day!✌️
Bill is my teacher. He is the best! Thanks, Bill.
You're always welcome, Donna!
I’m over 55 years old and have been learning to play the piano for almost a year.
I’ve spent my whole life as a physics teacher and scientist at the university. I knew my hearing was so poor that I couldn’t distinguish sounds or recognize musical notes. A C or an E sounds the same to me. My son, who is over 30, started learning, and he’s making some progress. So I bought a piano too -a t least I can delay the effects of ageing by doing musical exercises that neither my brain nor body is used to. 🙂 (sorry, I wrote this message in my mother language, then translated by AI and then edited some stuff)
Since I have extensive teaching experience, I’ll comment on the self-teaching problems discussed in this video.
1. A Tendency To Race
The Bill's words are very accurate.
I didn’t rush. New skills have to form, and for that, new connections between neurons responsible for those skills must develop. These connections mostly form during sleep, so you have to play the piano many times for something to develop.
2. Lack of Direction
This idea is also true.
If you want to learn something, choose one source, such as a textbook, and study it thoroughly. When you have a solid base of knowledge, you can browse other books for more interesting material. I’m glad I chose Bill’s lessons as the backbone of my piano learning.
3. The Tick of Doom
Now, here’s a real challenge.
Some elements took days or weeks to practice. For example, the second bar of lesson 8, with fast notes, I don’t even know how long that took. Or lesson 9… the first two bars also took weeks. Little by little, every day, I could spend 20-40 minutes; I had no more patience than that.
On average, one month-that’s how long it took to master one lesson. I didn’t work every day due to other responsibilities, but I tried to fit in at least 20 minutes whenever possible. There were probably no days longer than 60 minutes of practice. So, in 11 months, I covered about 10-11 lessons.
4. Scales & Exercises
Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Every time I sat down to play, I’d go through everything I’d learned from the first lesson. It was like warming up for athletes before tackling the hard part, for which I barely had enough patience for a few minutes. Sometimes I skipped exercises-like lesson 7’s, which was boring. I played scales every time until one day, I reached the major scales, and now that’s part of my warm-up routine. Three scales are too many; I keep repeating just two.
5. Not Getting Feedback
This is a real problem. You don’t want to be discouraged, especially if someone says you’re doing something wrong, and you’ll have to relearn it. That’s the scariest threat. Somehow, it’s easier to stay in your own bubble. I reassure myself that if I can play smoothly, it must mean I’m not doing everything wrong. :-)
6. Inefficient Practice
It’s hard to assess this. Still, I think if you overcome the technical “finger” problem and gain freedom, it means maybe you didn’t do it in the most optimal way, but if it works, it’s not that bad.
7. Unknown Unknowns
I haven’t reached this level of understanding yet. When I finish all the beginner lessons, I’ll start figuring out what I’m doing wrong. See question 2. :-)
8. Overestimating Weaknesses/Underestimating Strengths
I think it’s better not to overthink this. Just overcome the tasks, and the results will show.
9. Lack of Reinforcement
I think it’s better not to overthink this, either. Just complete the tasks, and the progress will become clear.
When I reviewed the notes from the first lessons, they seemed much simpler compared to lessons 10 or 11. Only then do you feel that you’re actually making progress.
10. It’s Just Pressing Buttons
Bill’s comments are accurate, but unfortunately, you can only think about the colours and richness of the melody after you’ve learned to hit the keys correctly. That means you shouldn’t worry about it too early. First, conquer the beginner's course. :-)
Sincerely,
Amazing video, and amazing tips!
Fascinating that the non-piano specific tips seem to be nice advice when extrapolated to approaching learning most skills in life.
Glad you found the tips useful! It's interesting how music lessons can reflect broader life skills, isn't it? Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts!
Oh man, the "Tick of Doom" and the "Attack the Problem" points are GOLD. I need to send this to all my young piano students (parents) just for these two if nothing else! I also need to apply most of this to myself...
Im a beginner that uses your piano course, thank you very much for that! My mom got used to play piano and it might be I took something from that in my childhood. Right now, at the same time with your lesson course, I am learning 'my heart will go on' using a simple 'push-to-play' visual guide that are a lot on TH-cam and when I play I actually listen to the sound and notice things that sound 'not right' (mainly because of my piano is pretty old and might not be in the best condition since it was never maintained).
You're welcome! Let me know how you get on with the course, and if there's anything I can help with. Yes, listening is absolutely key: listen closely and you'll progress quicker!
I am a classical guitar player for over 20 years, so I know how-to sight-read music and I want to learn piano
Not a pianist, but I muddle through jazz chord charts. I would like to get better- this seems like a good approach.
Glad you think so - always interesting to hear perspective from players of other instruments!
This is wonderful advice. I know multiple instruments and each instrument I still have a different song for each to warm up. 30 minutes and if I get it wrong well it's time to see what's going on lol. It's cool how you can just choose any note and make a scale then chords from that scale. Music feels free emotionally but the time is never free.
I just decided to leave my teacher and self teach. There is so much out there that I was getting confused. But your video was fantastic! It addressed most of my questions. I will definately check out your course. Thank you!
You're welcome, Donna - I'm glad it helped. If you have any specific questions or problems about anything in the course, give me a shout. It sometimes takes me a while to reply to comments, but I always get there in the end (and if I don't, remind me!)
Self-teachers. Don’t forget to use your metronome. Once you’ve learned a piece, turn it on and see if you can keep up. Scales and warm up too.
Absolutely!
I am a beginner (a week) and this is great information for me to keep in mind. Thank you!
You're welcome, Alan! Good luck, let me know how you get on, and feel free to ask any questions...!
I started playing Keyboard end of last year (and had it collect dust for some months since beginning of the year) and used your beginner lessons. I am 100% guilty of not mastering the basics before moving on. I still have struggle reading the notes, because I tend to go through the notes, learn and memorize which button comes next and where my hand has to be and then play that from memory. Also I rushed through the lessons a bit to get to a point where i can play/engage one or two songs i like, so my motivation does not go out the window again like in the beginning of the year. but now i actually have to learn the stuff i rushed through, because lesson 8 actually gives me some problems
The notorious lesson 8 strikes again! (It's lesson 9 for some people...). You do raise a very valid and important point about motivation, though: it's easy for me to say "work hard on the basics", but I guess the basics don't always feel like progress, and people need a feeling of progress to motivate themselves to keep going, right?
This is great! I was chugging along learning with a teacher then
moved and found your channel and Patreon …But After a few years of fun but still a bit beginner, I had to take a pretty long hiatus for carpel tunnel surgery.
I’m fully healed and probably stronger now but having a a nard time jumping back in. I can still site read book 1 stuff enough to play but really want to get back to improving.
I now have a plan. Don’t jump into the deep end! Go back to beginning 😊
as a self taught adult piano hobby-ist, yes this rings a lot of bells
#3. pushing past when it first sounds ok - could not agree more, that's when to try different tempos, different accents and rhythms, etc.
#4. scales and exercises, the best exercise I ever did was play all of the first 20 Hanon Exercises in all twelve keys, both forwards and backwards. for months and months and months. In fact I am absolutely dumbfounded that Hanon didn't think to mention playing in other than the key of C, my fingers had an hard time accommodating the different heights of the white and black keys, and still do to some extent even after all those months and months and months of practice.
#5. look at a recording of yourself a week or a month later
Believe me, by the standards of some of my learners late 60s is very young! Anyhow, I'm glad this video rang some bells for you. Let me know how you get on, and yes, please do try recording yourself. It can be very challenging (somehow everything gets weirdly harder the instant you hit "record"...) but it can be very, very useful.
The bad thing about being self-taught is you're gonna make mistakes, and you'll spend some time fixing them. The good thing about being self-taught is you're going though your own path - it might not be the most efficient one, but you're going to have so much fun. When I make comparison to someone trained (around my level), I noticed that while they know all scales, they don't have a clue what to do with them. I spent a year having fun in just one, and I know it inside out (chord progressions, the works). Now I can pick piece in any scale (takes me a minute to construct it first), and learning the piece amounts to a lot of "ok, I see what you're doing there" and just a few "hmm, interesting". I found triads way more useful - they are much more easier to memorize, they make it a breeze to find fourths and fifths and you can actually start playing something with them, so fun practice.
1. Répétition; over learning especially the foundation scales, sight reading even the easiest exercises. Practice regularly everyday not skipping then all at once. Isolate difficult measures-repeate 29 30 times; reinforcement is repetition. Give yourself time…work the practice schedule do not give up…be dedicated to learning at your level. ❤
Don't always be out there at the cutting edge all the time, also be shoring up your fundamentals. I love that
Absolutely - glad it rang a bell for you!
A bit of an odd comparison maybe but: I used to record some of my matches from an online shooter game I play, and rewatching them actually really helped me get better and understand what I could improve and why.
Like he said about recording yourself play to later look it over and learn from it.
lol I’m mostly self taught but I did go for a career as a keyboardist and educator. This validated a lot of the findings I had in my journey. Thanks for sharing!
The "its just pressing buttons" mentality really resonates with me as I started like that and only in recent years have I started to really listen and improvising stuff.
Great video
Thank you, Jorge! Yes, it's a pretty major problem, and continues to be for almost all piano players - because the thing makes the sound for us it's easy to stop paying attention to the actually sounds...!
I’m pleasantly surprised to see Bill Hilton’s channel gaining popularity and to see his face. Good luck Bill, love your work ❤
Thank you very much indeed!
The tick of doom is a huge problem for me with my ADHD, I often end up rushing pieces so i can get to the next piece i want to learn so as soon as i get it right, i move on. I'm not even self taught and i barely have 3 pieces in my repertoire!!! New years res was to fix that asap
This is great- thank you! I just started sharing videos on my TH-cam channel in the hope of making music literacy accessible to all. Learning to read music opens up a whole new world for musicians.
You're welcome - and good luck with the channel. It's tougher to get started on TH-cam than it used to be, but it's worth sticking with: your content looks good!
I really appreciate this. My piano journey began when I was in grade school and my parents bought me a Magnus Chord Organ - you know - one of those wind-blown devices with a piano keyboard, and a bank of buttons for major and minor chords. It came with a book that included several pieces - the melody and the accompanying chords. From there, I went on to become a trumpet player. Trumpet playing lead me to an advanced school where I had to learn music theory. Music theory took me back to the keyboard, as. a way of 'cheating' my compositions. Now, with a real piano in my possession, I began to mimic popular/rock music. Some tunes I could parrot note-for-note. PROBLEM: I had NO formal piano teaching, and as such, my fingerings were obnoxious - blasphemous! Decades later, I attempted piano lessons. That lasted . . . not so much. Then, another twenty years later, I entered into college - a Recording Degree - and Basic Piano was required. I nailed that class! HOWEVER - to this day, there are few pieces I can legitimately play. I AM NOT A PIANIST! I used to have singers at church ask if I would accompany them. I would say, "Sure - if you give the music, and let me have about a month". LOL. You see - I don't really play "by ear" - play by ear in the sense that I hear the piece, and I can discern the chords. Then, I simply "work out" a useable piano arrangement that fits. That's my piano journey. Can I ever break through, and become a REAL pianist? I guess that depends on one's definition of "real".
Thank you very much for your good concern
Ive done a lot of learning about learning. And this might be the single greatest quick resource for an overview of common pitfalls Ive ever come across.
This stuff applies across the board, and thats exactly the sort of body of knowledge I'm looking to identify and compile right now.
This is damn near 10 commandments level..
Bravo!
I’m a self taught piano player of about 20 years and your points are so accurate! While I’ve been blessed with opportunities to play, in hindsight I think I would have been EVEN BETTER had I been taught by someone in my earlier years. It’s harder now for me to embrace being taught because I’ve made a lot of progress on my own (outside of me watching more videos since March 2021). Thanks for this video!
You have to keep humbling yourself to keep learning, I’m a Piano teacher to 60+ students every week and I still have lessons. I like to feel like an idiot and continue improving.
Most of this is excellent advice no matter your age or what you are learning!
Thanks Sam - glad you think so!
The tick of doom part was really helpful, I never thought about this, but it makes so much sense now...
Bill, I retired at age 64 a few months ago and I just acquired a piano with the goal of learning in the months and years to come. I discovered your online course and I am plodding my way through it now. I found the 10 problems of self-taught pianists and wanted to say thank you. While I didn't expect this to be a quick endeavor, I appreciate the callout of the pitfalls we can experience as we go. I appreciate your presentation and I am hoping to use your course as my plan going forward. As an older learner I am struggling to learn the notes on the sheet music but I continue to work at it before pressing forward. Thanks again for your program!!
You're very welcome - also at 64 you're an absolute spring chicken by the standards of some people who follow the course, so I say make use of your youth and vitality! The thing with the notes and the sheets is just to keep plugging away: a little bit every day. Yes, kids learn it quicker, but you can learn it more reliably (and probably with a high chance of success) because of your extra maturity and life experience - it really does make a colossal difference. Good luck with the course, let me know how you get on, and do get in touch if you get stuck with any of it!
I got this randomly recommended and boy am I happy for it. Needed the advice.
Glad you liked it!
Please do a 10 Problems of Pianists who learn from Simply Piano/Yousician etc.
I would basically be the same video but I'd be shouting and jumping up and down all the way through 🤣😬