Having a piano is great but… learning to play it would be even better, right? The first place to start is to get your child the Best Beginner Piano Book . This book, for example, will be a key resource and way forwards that will keep your child in good stead.
In this post, we intend to give you resources and tools so you can learn to play for free or at the best price. Self-training with private classes can help you advance much faster and save a lot of money that way.
First of all, we are going to answer some questions that beginners always ask:
Well, first of all it must be made clear that there are several “degrees” of playing the piano. We could say that on one side there is the path to the conservatory and then there are the others.
Conservatory students are mainly classical concert performers and have a very strong technical background. Both, if it ends in the intermediate grade, or in the higher grade. Does this mean that you have to do this training to play the piano in an acceptable way? Not at all…
A piano student needs an acceptable hand technique, knowledge of harmony and reading of notes on sheet music. Many more things are taught in the conservatory but to “play the piano” you need what we have said before. The important thing is to dedicate time and be constant, better to study half an hour each day than 2 days of drought and then study 2 hours another day.
A motivated person who studies 4 hours a day from the beginning can advance 4 courses in just one year. It’s hard but it can be done. It’s a matter of motivation. Obviously, most of you will not be able to dedicate 4 hours a day to the instrument but maybe 45 minutes a day or an hour. In that case, in 4 or 5 years it can be played in a very acceptable way.
In the previous point, we have tried to define HOW MUCH, but now we have to talk about HOW. There are many people who wonder if you can learn to play the piano on your own or in a self-taught way. Basically, it can be done just like the guitar, although it is true that our friend with strings has much more material available for it. But it can still be done. Here we will help you.
Many people do not have the financial means to take piano lessons and therefore will try to find free lessons. Or maybe you only want it to compose and it is enough for you to know harmony and reflect it on the keyboard.
Apart from what can be learned in a self-taught way, it is normal to put together various learning techniques. But the main thing and what you have to be clear about is that there are no age limits. What matters is motivation and knowing that you will get to play, you have to visualize it.
First of all, make it clear that when you learn piano you also learn to use a keyboard, be it mechanical or digital. The system is the same.
On the one hand we can talk about some popular learning systems, but they are not the only ones, there are many more, so keep reading as we will talk about them along with the following points:
Learning piano from a book is a very effective method. These days books usually come with audiovisual material and it is a good option to start with, at least to know if you like it.
The Hanon method is famous, which is really a series of exercises to learn piano and gain dexterity with your hands. It is a very famous book but if you are going to learn in a self-taught way and you are a beginner, you should watch some videos of the exercises.
It’s really not easy to learn with the Hanon method and it’s a bit hard to mess with without a foundation. There are easier and better structured books like the following ones that we show you in our guide with books to learn to play the piano. There they will talk to you about basic chords, the position of each hand, the piano notes, etc.
There is another book which is the Suzuki method for children. This violin system extrapolated to other instruments, is a system for children to learn to play the piano in a natural way. Many of its approaches are applicable to adults but it is not a system designed to learn in a self-taught way but it can be a very good option for a child. Well, it is based on learning music as a natural language
If you are a beginner and have a small budget, it may be worth it with a cheap keyboard. But you have to have at least a sensitive keyboard, pedal input and USB MIDI to take advantage of all of the above
This is an important aspect when studying. It is very difficult to concentrate and take advantage of the time if you do not have the right environment for study.
If we can put the piano in an “office” type room this would be ideal. In this way we will get away a little from the daily distractions that exist in the home. If, for example, you arrive from work at 7:00 p.m. and you have an hour to study, it is very important to find your own space so that no one bothers you during that time.
Use a watch or stopwatch: it is an action that can help us a lot. Plan how your studio will normally be. Choose how many minutes you will dedicate to warm up, how many to music theory and how many to technique. Then you can dedicate yourself to playing the scores that your learning method has set as “homework” and other scores that interest you. This is smart studying and by doing it this way you will concentrate more and your performance will be more than double in the same amount of time.
