How I Practice Piano | Hacker News Reader

How I Practice Piano

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480 pointsyarapavan182 comments

Classically trained pianist here (since 7 years old), I like the article's advice.

> Use the correct fingering, dynamics, articulation, etc. from the very beginning; you are never going to get around to “fixing” it later.

When I was an impatient kid my piano teachers would keep insisting I play sections slow on a first pass, which annoyed me (it was like reading a book out loud slowly), but it was only until many years later when I played pieces like Un Sospiro[0] which are intractable if you do not start practicing at something like 16 times slower than performance tempo. If you start out correctly, the rest will follow, and IME, sight reading greatly improves as well.

> [...] you may reach a point where you can’t play any faster, no matter how hard you try. What is likely happening is that the hand motions you are using—which come naturally at the slower tempo you started with—simply will not work at such high speeds.

This is completely true, for instance, in ragtime, the left hand makes big, quick jumps and there is often no time to look at where it will land (which one likely does when playing slowly), so repeating a bar over and over again to incrementally refine your distance estimate is crucial.

This applies to things like typing on a keyboard as well, if you focus on correct finger placement (and correct use of the 4th and 5th fingers), your WPM might take a hit for a few days or a week, but in the long term it really helps.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po_a1SmZKLs

I'm a classically trained pianist as well, though a couple decades out of practice. My 10 year old son has been learning to play for the past couple years. As he learned his pieces he would fall into just horrible habits of wrong tempo dynamics, etc. So he gets to the end of his lesson book, good enough to play through the pieces but really only 20% done learning the pieces.

So his teacher tells him to memorize the pieces. Good I think, so I have him go memorize each piece and give me a concert once a day. He's like 40% of the way there now, better but no where near close.

So his teacher now says go learn with your eyes closed. _This_ made the difference. He plays with the correct rhythm, corrects any mistaken notes because well mistakes compound, even his dynamics sound right now. It's actually beginning to sound like actual music!

For him I think closing the eyes got him out of his mentality of just rushing the pieces, it put him out of his comfort zone and that has made all the difference.

I was this kid, and I think I know exactly what's happening. He's playing the piano as if it were Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, as a game where the goal is to hit the right keys at the right time. Somehow you have to communicate the idea that the goal is to produce something that's enjoyable to listen to.

Playing with eyes closed is something that I've never tried, but my guess is that it's forcing him to listen and that's why it works. (I need to try it myself!) What worked for me when I was a bit older is my teacher making me get a little handheld recorder (cheap ones were surprisingly good back then, and I'm sure the tech has improved). Try having him record the song and listen to the recording, and ask what he thinks. In particular, does it sound musical? Why or why not? My guess is that it'll reveal details he wasn't able to focus on while playing, and it will motivate him to fix them.

This resonates with me. One of the best advice from my organ teacher was to „stop playing the notes and start really listening to yourself.“

Closing my eyes really helped with removing all stimuli that distracted me from actually doing that and it made all the difference.

As a competitive partner dancer, I too will close my eyes sometimes to shut out distractions and focus on the movement more. This is especially useful while practicing but I also sometimes do it during social dancing (provided there is enough room and I won't be putting my partner at risk by crashing into other people or being crashed into).

Feel the damn music :/

Having started playing music again after a 10 year hiatus, I recently came to the same realization about my younger self's approach to musicianship. Hitting the right notes is table stakes. But going beyond that requires developing the ability to listen to yourself critically, recognize the difference in sound between talented musicians and yourself, caring to fix the difference, and taking steps to do so.

This reminds me of the piano teacher (danthecomposer) I am following on youtube: he calls his approach a "philosophical approach" to learning the piano and to me it seems quite influenced by daoism or zen.

he puts heavy emphasis on practicing with your eyes closed from the beginning. this becomes possible through visualizing scales and chords from the beginning.

other aspects are: getting your ego out of the way, trusting in you inherent musicality and allowing you creative source to steer your fingers to express your emotions and avoiding conscious interference. there is also a lot of simple improvisation inside a chord from the beginning.

i cant speak for the long term success of his technique, but i like the approach and it makes sense to me with respect to other skills i have aquired before.

his youtube channel is a bit hard to navigate but this playlist is a good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQxJJ7AgS7k&list=PL4cPpP-Ua6...

he also has a blog: http://piano-jazz.blogspot.com/p/water-pianism.html

After about 9 years learning piano as a kid I had one year of tuition from a concert pianist when I went to University.

He was an excellent teacher - one of the things he majored on was ‘blind’ familiarity with the keyboard. He would get you to close your eyes, then ask you to pick out, for example, all the Cs on the keyboard going up the octaves. Made a huge difference to my confidence in positioning my hands at speed…

This sound amazing, is there any teaching material I can buy to start with it on my own?

To be honest a lot of the guidance was verbal. The only book we used was called ‘Help Yourself to Sight Reading a Practical Tutor for Pianists’ by Daphne Sandercock. The writing style was quite severe and had phrases like ‘a fault common to weaker pupils at this stage…’

The feedback process of listening to the music you’ve created is almost as important as the score itself, which to me feels like a guide. Sure you can play the right notes in the right order, but smaller tempo and pressure adjustments are made by feeling the music. My girlfriend played piano for years and hated it, she can play almost anything, but it sounds horrible because she isn’t listening to and interpreting what she plays. That is where the joy of piano is for me.

I use a "Temporal distancing" method for feedback of audio / visual recordings of my performances.

I record and watch or listen after many days. I have recordings of some of my performances from years ago which felt really terrible on the day of the performance but felt ok many years later.

Music is another way of storytelling. It does have lot of conventions, yet it still needs to have an ability to lead and tell.

Each piece could be seen as many stories and as performer you can choose your story, then try to tell it. Classical pieces obviously have a canonical version which is what most audience would expect. Still, when learning such piece the story still needs to be there, not just as a sequence of prescribed pianos, fortes, and ritenuntos, but as a moving flow to capture interest and convey some relatable image.

I guess the classical training also can equip performers with such imagery. I have grateful memories of teachers that tried to project a story into our kid-minds before delving into technical aspects of learning a new piece. Very inspiring times.

A bit off topic, but thank you so much for sharing Un Sospiro, wasn’t expecting to hear that much beauty this morning.

Early-on I taught my kids that “Practice makes perfect” is wrong. The right advice is “Practicing correctly makes perfect, because practice makes everything permanent, including mistakes”. This applies to music, chess, swimming, anything really.

Start slow and in small chunks with a focus on “correct”, everything else takes care of itself.

I've heard this captured concisely as 'Practice makes permanent'.

Yes! My cello teacher told me “what you can only play slowly, you can eventually play fast; what you can only play wrong, you can’t play at all.”

Keep in mind, this is a man who continued playing as a soloist in concert once after breaking his A string by playing high on his D string. You have to know the rules before you can break them well.

I practice Feldenkrais which is partly about improving coordination of movement and practicing things slowly is one of the major ideas behind that. I watched an online talk earlier this week talking about the 'Weber-Fechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle' as an explanation behind that. I haven't scrutinised the science - but there's info on page 28 of this PDF: https://www.feldenkraisguild.com/files/Journal_30.pdf

Paul Barton's versions are intended for tutorials. For another take with better flow and melody line, try:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSHwX2O7j2w

World of difference IMO.

I think it all depends. I ignore dynamics and fingering when starting out, and I think for the most part, fingering doesn't really matter unless you are trying to play extremely fast sections, which pretty much require repetition to get right.

FWIW, if I was learning Un Sospiro, I would just try get through the whole song. I played it at 1/2 speed and that seemed to be a reasonable attempt.

Sometimes I feel if you have to follow the techniques in the OP, the song may be too challenging for you.

Sure, for Un Sospiro there were definitely sections that were easy (first few pages are quite repetitive) so not much issue there, but there are runs in the middle where I practiced slowly for a while until it came naturally.

As someone who doesn't play piano, what you were describing reminded me exactly of my typing experience. I'm glad to see you thought the same! You mentioned the 4th and 5th fingers on the keyboard specifically — what is the correct finger placement for those keys relative to what you think most people do?

Can't speak for everyone, but for me, I realized I didn't use my right pinkie to hit backspace or left pinkie to hit tab, and likewise for my 4th fingers, so I would end up moving my wrist. After a bit of practice I didn't need to use my wrists as much and practically all the keys can be reached in this way.

I play piano and touch type pretty fast. This example, of using the right pinkie for Backspace, is a good analogy with piano fingering.

I use my 4th finger for Backspace, not 5th (pinkie). While pinkie may seem logical at first, it is much shorter on my hand than 4th. To use 4th, I only have to move my wrist to the right. To use 5th, I have to move my whole arm toward the screen, which is a much bigger deal. Same kind of thing happens in piano fingering all the time.

The other key thing about fingering is you don't want to stretch fingers if you can avoid it. Stretched fingers cause fatigue and fingers are less flexible when stretched. Try stretching your fingers apart and moving them quickly. So when finding a fingering, you want to group notes into comfortable hand positions, play what you can in that position, then move your hand to the next position. This is commonly called grouping and surfacing if you want to do some research.

You also want to avoid playing with your wrist twisted to the far right or left. If your fingering requires a twisted wrist, the notes should probably be grouped a different way, which will also change the hand position and fingering you use.

>Use the correct fingering

How to figure out what is "correct" fingering and what is not? I asked some pianists that question and I've got 3 versions of answers from each of them followed by advice to try out and see what works for you. So what is "correct" fingering then?

Here's where having a teacher helps a lot. I started out as an adult beginner, and I remember that in one of the first study books (Duvernoy or Burgmuller), there was a passage in the left hand with a sequence of six eights, it went like C-F-Bb-F-A-F. Because of the slow tempo, I could have easily done it 5-1-5-1-5-1, where my thumb would just repeat the F, and my pinky would go down the C-Bb-A sequence. This is where my teacher stepped in - he told me that this is a great learning opportunity, and I should play it 5-1-4-1-5-1, fifth finger on the C, fourth over it to the Bb, fifth to the A. The main reason was that this would be more comfortable at higher speeds, but also that it would allow to do a finger legato on the sequence of three notes.

A lot of the fingering remarks at this stage were about legato. In the easy Beethoven Sonatina in G, you have sort of a reversal of my earlier story - the downward movement is in the top notes here. There's a sequence of two chords, D-A and D-G in bar three. You could easily do both of those 51-51, but then the possibility of joining the two upper notes would be lost. The "correct" fingering would be 51-52, lifting the pinky and doing a nice legato on the top notes, one that follows into bar 4 with 53. It makes a world of difference when you hear how it sounds with a proper chord legato applied.

If you don't have a teacher, the next best thing would be to make sure you have a good edition with the proper fingerings added. Something like Alfred Masterwork, or the newer Schirmer Performance - both are relatively inexpensive and nicely edited. But then you will get just the fingering without the reasoning behind it.

Thank you very much for such detailed description and recommendation. I think "legato" reasoning is a good example for how reasoning works in general and so one can guess what correct fingering would be when there is no teacher around.

> and so one can guess what correct fingering would be when there is no teacher around

At least in some cases, yes. For me, that's the real point of having a teacher - learning the thought process, not the pieces.

One thing worth mentioning is that sometimes the correct fingering for a piece is contextualized. There are pieces that you might treat as a goal in their own right, but they might also be just a stepping stone to other pieces. For example, you might see a sequence of three notes in the left hand, and there will be a "correct" fingering that's most comfortable for just those three notes. But the teacher that suggested this piece knows that those three notes can be seen as a simplified version of a six note pattern that occurs throughout a more difficult piece you will tackle later. So the "correct" fingering they suggest to you is the fingering that's most comfortable for the more difficult version you haven't played yet. You're not looking at the piece as-is, you're thinking of it in the context of what you'll eventually play and optimizing the fingering for performance of the target piece.

You will often hear that "correct" fingering is the one most comfortable. This is only partially true when you're in the early stages. Often, you go for something that's suboptimal in a particular piece because it will be more comfortable in another piece down the road.

I think of it like a dynamic programming type situation. You have notes to be assigned fingers to and the metric is minimizing uncomfortable/awkward hand movements. So the specifics can vary from person to person (and hand to hand), but there are generally agreed upon fingerings for things like scales or chromatic runs.

>there are generally agreed upon fingerings for things like scales or chromatic runs

Can you point out to such "agreed" fingering somewhere? Because as a self learner I perhaps had no chance to know which one is it?

Here's an example fingering chart for major scales: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/20/36/98/203698fda995f78e8621...

For the chromatic scale, I was taught to alternate 3 and 1, using 2 when there are two white keys in a row.

A more generic rule I heard later on was to not use your thumb on black keys (when playing scales). That constraint can sometimes help with other fingerings falling into place more intuitively.

I learned it a little bit differently, for example

https://youtu.be/twc_Yo4LFJI

As I understand it's not different at all. Diagram shows how you play it continiously (not one octave only)

It is for me; both comfortable and clear sound; how I see and agree the correct positioning is. Emphasis on seeing how people have incorrect positioning can form bad habits. Fix these for yourself; and for your audience

Most piano books have fingerings printed, and you'll find of course that they vary between editors. In general however there will be a fingering that makes the most sense. I'd posit those pianists you asked misunderstood the question, I hope you keep at it! A friend played me for recently a piece she's been learning for a year and is just so happy, and proud of her work. It's a beautiful thing, to play music.

After sight-reading through the piece a few times you can generally start writing down the fingering on the score. Keep a pencil handy.

It's a bad idea to finger on the first play or the first day because there's a risk of premature optimisation. It doesn't take much analysis apart from one or two specific problems. The fingerings I end up with usually vary somewhat from the editor's.

But the OP is correct, once you've got a fingering, you have to stick to it, even if it's suboptimal in places. It's your fingering, and if you change something after 200 repetitions there's a danger of slipping back into the old pattern and stumbling.

This is quite subjective, but taking some time to analyze the piece and figuring out what works best for you is usually better than just doing without thinking.

I don't think it's a given that there's a single correct fingering, but it seems obvious that an incorrect fingering is one that's impossible to use at your desired tempo.

People have different sized hands, and different hand strengths, so some fingerings may be more damaging to a pianist's hands, and some might be more comfortable but break down at higher speeds, and some might simply be impractical at any speed.

Indian classical dancer here.

> Do not work on this section for more than twenty minutes.

This is not something I've heard often in my field but I had to learn this over the years. Performers want to present a piece as if it was never practiced and was all made up on the spot, and yet we do have to practice a piece day after day. Losing vitality and "becoming rehearsed" through over-practice is a real problem.

The book "A Soprano on Her Head" by Eloise Ristad, who was a piano teacher, really helped me with my dance & acting practice. I restructured a lot based on that book (added improvisational elements, reduced forceful drill-like elements, more self-observation, less verbal cues), and my technique and enjoyment both improved a lot during covid lockdown. She also wrote a book called "Bold Beginnings" for teaching piano using a new method that she made up, but I've not been able to find a copy.

I'd completely forgotten about Eloise Ristad and "A Soprano On Her Head." Fanstasic book. Thanks for the reminder. I poked around looking for Bold Beginnings and didn't find it but I did find this page that might be interesting. https://www.modernmusicology.com/elosie-ristad-bold-music-te...

A Soprano On Her Head is available at archive.org, and I found a seller for Bold Beginnings here: https://www.naomialdort.com/book-bold-beginnings.html

I've been learning guitar and ive been amazed at how bad lessons and education is for adult students. The apps i have used barely work and are extremely unambitious.

Classes are so disorganized and i am constantly wading through material that is a mile wide but a foot deep.

Yes i have seen Justin Guitar I'm not a huge fan. I dont want to have to wade through content to find the exercises that are relevant to me. I think Duolingo has an interesting approach to this, where has you re-visit concepts every day and it tells you what to practice to reduce decision fatigue.

I want a dashboard that is keeping track of my goals and progress akd has an opinionated way for me to measure my skill, and to direct my effort.

I think there’s some sort of issue happening where learning in general is widely misunderstood, and teaching is undertaken by people who have little understanding of how humans learn things.

I don’t know what’s going on. Something about the wide access of the internet plus a bunch of teaching methods that were traditional and terrible resulted in everyone deciding they can teach stuff and somehow we almost act as if it doesn’t matter how something is taught??

I can’t explain it but I see it everywhere.

Anyway, perhaps just pay someone to teach you guitar? That’s how I learned martial arts and music all my life. Nothing beats one on one lessons with an expert.

I should have included a summary of how I'm learning in my post haha.

I take private lessons once a week, and strive for an hour a day practice.

I have a good summary on my blog: https://cresten.pizza/blog/2020-01-03-rocksmith-review/

When you say you've seen Justin Guitar do you mean the web site or YouTube? He has a structured program: https://www.justinguitar.com/classes/beginner-guitar-course-...

I haven't seen the new site design but it seems ok. When I started learning the guitar (~6 years ago) Justin was a huge help but I complemented that with in person lessons with some teachers and with additional material/random songs. So consider me a fan. I also recommend getting in touch with other musicians/players, that's gonna push your level way more than an app would.

May I ask how long ago you've started learning and what level are you at?

I think there is a lot of great material online. But in order to grok most of it you need to have some foundation.

I've never used any app (well, I use a metronome app) since I haven't seen anything that looked useful. Ear training apps could be useful but I haven't been able to stick with it. In general "apps" seem a poor fit for teaching the guitar.

This is the right answer here. Justinguitar has a very structured introduction to guitar, with specific practice exercises. Not sure what else you could want.

Honestly I just got really frustrated when I tried to sign up for the Justin guitar paid site and it just broke and wouldn't let me sign in and pay them.

Regarding Duolingo: I thought it was a fun way to learn the basics of a language, but I quickly found it to be extremely inefficient.

I've been ignoring Anki for many years, thinking it was overly complicated and being disappointed that I had to create my own sets.

I finally came around last year, I automated the set generation based on a frequency list and currently I'm on a 450 day streak for my language of choice having learned ~6200 words.

I am actually building an iOS app based off of this concept. If you’re interested in trying out an early release and providing feedback, it would be seriously helpful! My email is in my HN profile.

Can you please share either the frequency list or the method you used to automate the deck generation? I've been looking to do something like this, perhaps with genanki.

I'm learning Italian, so I found this list:

https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/tullio-de-mauro/2016/...

It's based on the most frequent words in a collection of texts, with additional manual curation. The words have grammatical classification, but no translations.

I basically wrote a node.js script using some npm libraries, one that can parse PDFs and another one that can drive a headless Chrome.

I parsed the words from the list, and then looked up each one in an online dictionary using the chrome driver. Then I retrieved the translation from the DOM, making sure that I get the right part of speech for each word in the list (sometimes the same word can be an adjective and a noun for example).

The dictionary that I used also has example sentences, grammatical gender for nouns, a description of the meaning of the word in Italian, and very importantly, a phonetic transcription in IPA. I grabbed those as well.

Then I just dumped the whole thing to a CSV file and imported it into Anki, and I created a custom card template to show all this information. I also added text to speech which is wrong a lot of the time so I don't rely on it.

I only use Italian to English cards. I make sure that I know the pronunciation and the grammatical gender for nouns and not just the spelling.

The whole thing took maybe a weekend to write (I don't even regularly use javascript). The learning was the hard part (I spent at least an hour per day all of these days). It was only possible because I'm working from home.

The cards are perfect in most cases, but some require manual fixes (I'd say 5%).

All those things are helpful but nothing will ever beat one-on-one lessons (Covid/finances permitting) with a teacher who is proficient in the style of play you’re most interested in. Or if you have a buddy who will jam with you and show you scales, basic chord progressions, and standards. I have been playing guitar for 21 years now, and bass for about 7 (4 of those in a relatively successful band, as small gigging goes) and every time I stop being lazy and signup for lessons again my skills accelerate exponential faster than tooling around on my own.

I know Covid makes this difficult, as can cost, but I highly recommend it! Even an hour lesson every other week would work wonders for you.

Edit, grammar: I got my second Covid shot today and I’m a bit groggy.

Do you think some of the advances you make by having a teacher is the discipline.

I mean I guess you set up a time every week and have to actually go and spend that time. I guess you would feel bad if you didn't practice what the teacher told you to?

This is what stops me progressing, I don't have a reason to play. I never progressed more quickly than when I was in a band.

Teachers (good ones) teach and correct technique in ways that no apps or self study methods will ever be able to do. Unfortunately the most benefit here comes from in-person instruction which is hard right now. But in person, they can see the way you are holding the instrument, they can work directly with your hands, etc.

But yes a skilled teacher is always worth it if you have the money. Apps, subscription services, and so on have a vested interest in keeping paying customers. Therefore they ensure you always feel safe and comfortable. If you feel too challenged, your association with the sefvice will turn negative and you'll stop paying.

But learning an instrument is not comfortable; it's extremely challenging and requires hard work and commitment. It doesn't have to be like bootcamp, and of course it's really fulfilling to watch yourself improve, but there's no hiding how challenging it is, especially if it's your first one. Good teachers know this and have the pedagogy to help you through it in as efficient a manner as possible.

Besides, the good teachers are always in demand so they are usually not too concerned about losing a student here or there because they decided it was too hard for them.

I actually have a teacher so I can speak to this: a teacher helps a lot because they police my technique when they watch me play and point out errors in my technique.

Additionally I do find it motivating to have someone else on my team helping me keep motivated with playing.

I'm a guitar noob as well and I've been playing around with Rocksmith on PC. I don't think it replaces a real teacher at all but if you want something fun as an alternative and a way to learn popular pop/rock songs I suggest you check it out.

You can use it to practice like this post's article. You can repeat sections and slow the tempo down. I'm not a fan of how the game ramps up song difficulty (IMO I think it starts way too easy such that the practice is not useful), but you can tweak this really easily.

I have a review of Rocksmith on my blog actually: https://cresten.pizza/blog/2020-01-03-rocksmith-review/

It is nice to play along with songs but the exercises are not great.

It has so much potential though! I hope they're planning another one.

I bought a bass recently, which came with three free months of Fender Play [0]. I'm happy with it -- yeah, I've skipped stuff since I already know note values, scales, etc., but I like their progression.

They have a number of different styles of guitar (rock, blues, fingerpicking, etc.) with a 7-day free trial.

Their Facebook group is fantastic, really supportive, with "office hours" live videos taking questions every week.

[0] https://www.fender.com/play

I'll give fender play a try.

Hey honkycat,

I'm currently trying to solve the exact same problem you're describing, since I also got frustrated by the current state of music teaching.

I'm still in an early stage of development, currently trying to fetch proofs of interests and working on a prototype, but I should be able to release a MVP by the end of the year.

If you want to have a chat about it, or want to be on the list for early access, feel free to reach me.

https://mamie-note.dorik.io/

Nice, this really IS exactly what I was describing: A dashboard with daily exercises for me to iterate on without having to do the toil of building one myself.

Have you thought about taking lessons from a teacher?

I've been working on this, focusing on the fundamentals of playing and learning by ear. Check it out at https://www.goodbyeruth.com/

I was just mulling this over in my head compared to my guitar playing experience.

I am self-taught (some friends helped) and have played for just over 20 years.

I'm assuming here that you are not trying to learn classical guitar, if you are I think you should find a real teacher. I urge you to learn rock music by playing songs. I was an indie rock fan, and started off strumming the chords to my favourite songs. It is relatively easy to do, and the rewards come quickly. The trick is to find a song you like that uses simple open chords, and not too many of them! My first tune was 'Live Forever by Oasis' as an example (cringe). For something more tasteful try 'knocking on heaven's door' by Dylan. It is easy to read chord diagrams. Get a few thin picks and go for it. Really just go for it, the changes will speed up by themselves and the strumming patterns will too, by listening to the song and imitating. Now pick another song with some of the sme chords. A month of evenings can get you reasonably proficient. If you have a friend who is a bit further along then play with them Whenever you can. This is about as far as lots of famous musicians ever got. Remember that!

Alongside this you can try out some riffs. 'Smoke on the water' is the classic, but go with what you enjoy. Tab for these is free online and easy to read. Find a riff you like, if you have a friend who can play the chords while you riff that is fun. You learn riffs like the guy in the article, note by note.

Learning to solo is harder. I used to buy tab books and copy solos I liked. Eventually I realised that I needed to understand some very basic theory, like 'Keys' and 'scales'. I read this in a book but you can google. This is easy on a guitar because you only have to learn a scale shape once and you can change key by playing it in different places on the neck. If you like blues and rock and roll then you only need to learn the minor pentatonic scale to begin with. These 5 notes made many a solo. By running through those 5 notes you start to form licks and phrases you can use. The best way to learn this is to learn to play a basic 12 bar blues shuffle, and play with a friend, taking it in turns to solo. The second best way is a looper or backing track.

I then wanted to play folk fingerstyle. I found the tab for Nick Drake's 'Cello Song' in a magazine and spent a year repeating the first main phrase over and over, a few times most days. The rest of the song came exactly like the op and quite quickly. Afterwards I could pick up other fingerstlye songs quite quickly.

I don't know how to play Jazz.

I think the cap this way of learning places on you is that you don't learn much theory, which makes it hard to arrange songs, compose, etc. Just remember that a lot of the people you are listening to are in the same boat...

>The trick is to find a song you like

This is really a trick. Lately It's difficult to find a song I like. Most of them became boring or let's say not motivating to learn them.

I am really puzzled about what to learn next and I do not know where to get a good advice that is "workable" in my current situation.

I play by ear and can figure out chords for compositions I like and if I can't I may search the internet for the hard parts but usually I am too lazy to do it and it's more interesting to figure it out by myself. Also because lately I see that internet versions are frequently "worse" or even wrong or too primitive ignoring all they beauty of complicated chords.

So I am pleased with what I have on the one hand. On the other hand I am stuck with question what to learn next? I never master pieces to the complete perfection because honestly I do not perform for the public and so I find it hard to motivate myself with that because who needs another moderate piano player these days when there are plenty of trained pianists available? How many chances I have to win competition with "well trained" people? And who would wish to listen unless you are "perfect"? So what is the point? I play for myself or my friends but if I wish some piece to sound better I find it difficult to achieve even though I know that I am more than capable to improve them to a much better level. So I can't reasonably motivate myself as a "performer/future performer" to sit and train for many hours. I've heard that this "many hours training" could also rise my level of understanding theory but I do not see a direct connection between those.

Perhaps I just do not see it and thus do not know how to progress and choose what to learn next to move forward? Any advice?

What kind of pianist are you? Classical? If so have you thought about an about turn to try the boogie woogie or ragtime. You might find it very liberating, and easier to find someone to play along with.

>Since I play by ear I would not consicer myself classical.

>have you thought about an about turn to try the boogie woogie or ragtime.

If you have something concrete some particular piece or place to try those I would appreciate it very much and someone who is reading would too I think.

This is good advice. Knockin on heavens door is the perfect beginner song, although at ultimate guitar I think the most popular version uses a capo, just ignore that and play the chords.

I like ultimate guitar a lot, there are often simplified versions of songs so you can make rewarding progress early.

If you want something simple but need a noisy thrash, the next song could be Neil Young "Rockin in the free world", easy to make that sound good even if you don't have a great singing voice.

I pay for an ultimate guitar subscription. I like the website okay, but I found that my copy of guitar pro is a bit better.

Ultimate guitar would do everything I need if it had a way for me to highlight sections and then hit a a shortcut to restart the section.

I pay for it too. If I hear a song I want to play I want to get straight into it.

What I would really like though is something like 'lead sheets' which just tell you the chord progression and tab the main theme, so I can jump straight into my own version of a song.

Yeah I can't say the UG website is anything special, the scrolling feature is pretty useless without being able to limit it to smaller sections of the pieces as you said.

Mostly I pay for the breadth of songs available.

I really like the analogy of trying to learn to run by speed walking faster and faster. It can’t be done, you have to specifically practice your ‘running’ form. Sometimes I do this way before I’m ready and make tons of mistakes like you mentioned, but with the focus of understanding the ‘running’ form as opposed to the speed walking form. This can literally be hilarious, I laugh so much at how ridiculous it can sound but it is really helpful!

What do you think about accidentally learning too rote like? For example I never really understood how to play a lot of classical until I was able to feel what it feels like to ‘speak’ music as a jazz pianist. Now I really try to understand what I am saying when I play as if it were my own notes. I can still get in the habit of relying on reading & memorizing without really getting to the heart of the notes and it usually causes me to hit a plateau.

For example I’ve been working on James P Johnson’s ‘Carolina Shout’ off of a transcription and hit this plateau without even knowing it. I realized it when I heard Ethan Iverson perform it and realized he was owning the song so much more than the rote attempt I was making. What do you think about moving past the rote learning and owning a piece?

https://youtu.be/eM09yob0RFM

My own experience is that I can't really develop the appropriate expressiveness and dynamics in a piece until the notes and fingering can fly on autopilot. So learning it by rote is sort of a necessary first step towards owning it. But the exact mechanics of musical memorization and expression are different for everyone, so there isn't a lot of one-size-fits-all advice out there.

If anyone is looking for a digital tool to practice Piano I have made a FREE website called Piano Gym!

https://pianogym.com

It's flash cards but for Piano, and works with MIDI Piano connected to your computer.

We use spaced repetition to schedule the flash cards and all you have to do is show up every day and do your reps! The big goal is to remove friction from learning and allow anyone to make their own content if they want to.

I'm hoping in a few weeks to make a show hacker news post, but right now I'm bug fixing and working on getting our curriculum loaded up. Once that's done everything is ready to go! So come check it out if you're looking for a new approach to Piano practice and learning!

And if you're really into this idea, we're on Patreon and appreciate any help making the dream come true! https://patreon.com/PianoGym

Related but far less polished (open source) tool I built that also uses web MIDI:

https://benkaiser.github.io/learn-piano/

Useful for the amatuers among us that can't sight read to save ourselves, but enjoy the falling notes style.

You can drop any midi file in and start practicing. It doesn't have many advanced features, but you can change the tempo and set "jump" points to go back to.

Haha, well I'm in dire need of help.

If you're interested I'd love to combine our powers and get Piano Gym farther!

Reach out to me if you're interested! :)

There's also https://sightreading.training/ which I found helped me a lot to learn how to sight read faster, and it also lets you plug in your piano via MIDI.

Sounds interesting, but the interactive demo for sheet music doesn't work for me in Chrome. There are many CORS errors and then an error in: sheet_music_display_controller.tsx:187 ERROR

Update:

I have fixed the bug!

I just wanted to say thanks for pointing this out, as I can't believe how I overlooked it! Seriously, I appreciate it!

Tell everyone about Piano Gym!

Drats! Like I said, I'm working on bugs and curriculum stuff before I go for a grand reveal. Thank you for the heads up.

If you have the time and are interested send an image of your bug or steps to reproduce to support@pianogym.com!

Otherwise stay tuned and check it out! I'll make sure to fix this :)

Slightly OOT. It is refreshing to see how common an article about piano appears at the front page of HN. I have been struggling with the stereotypes / pre-assumption that most software engineers' hobbies (esp fresh grads) seems to be always around tech / electronics.

I'm in my mid twenties, and having never touched a piano before, I got a Roland FP-10 two months ago.

I'm slowly clawing my way through a music theory book, but I've already learned some tiny pieces of music on the side (like the beginning of Strobe by Deadmau5) and it's stunning how fast one can get from "absolutely clueless" to "hey that sounds like music".

It's enchanting and wonderful. Sure, music theory can be annoying there are many weird and semi-arbitrary rules about how things are called and there's lots of historical baggage attached to everything, but as soon as you touch the keys, everything just fades away. Man, you can pour so much emotion into that thing.

So if you find yourself (like I often did) thinking about how cool it would be to play the piano, but it's probably hard and it's too late and there's no time and you wouldn't even be a good player... Do it. It's easier than you think and YOU CAN do it.

> It's enchanting and wonderful. Sure, music theory can be annoying there are many weird and semi-arbitrary rules about how things are called and there's lots of historical baggage attached to everything

I'm in the same boat as you (almost identical, different FP though), but i'm actually fascinated by the music theory.

In the way that some games touch the "software engineer" side of my brain (Satisfactory, Factorio) but is tiring, music theory weirdly gives me similar vibes without being tiring. Maybe it will be when i know more, but currently music theory just feels like patterns and patterns and patterns. It's remarkable how much you can learn with a handful of patterns. While you're learning one thing you'll often noticed patterns for another.. it's really interesting to me.

I also am a novice guitarist and i find piano much more interesting from the music theory standpoint. The patterns on the guitar are dynamic (based on tuning) and it feels like the guitar makes music theory more difficult. I've enjoyed piano much more for this reason.

I agree, piano is good fun to learn at any age. I highly recommend it.

But why bother with alternate tunings for the guitar? Just learn the standard EADGBe tuning and all the scale shapes and chords will make sense eventually. Piano is also a stringed instrument, with one common tuning that most of us westerners play in.

Because the voicings change quite a bit with what you're able to reach in different tunings.

I'm not saying alternate tunings are mandatory, just that you can't learn a single tuning with guitar and expect to only ever know just that. It's Very common to change tunings in guitar. Not so in Piano, that i've seen yet at least.

> Piano is also a stringed instrument, with one common tuning that most of us westerners play in.

Are there different tunings for Pianos? I'm not even sure what different tunings would look like, non-sequential pitch ordering? C next to G or something?

The only Piano "tuning" i'm familiar with is temperament, however that's functionally different than what we're talking about with Guitar.

Fair enough. I was just responding to your statement that guitar makes music theory more difficult. I'm not an expert in either instrument, and I think they each have their advantages and disadvantages. I like how scales and chord shapes (i.e. barre chords) are movable up and down the neck. It really taught me about transposing music and playing in different keys. On piano, a major triad chord looks different depending on the root note.

Today I was trying out the Sweet Child O' Mine intro and that's in a different tuning, although the shapes remain the same. (it's like capo -1). I know Drop D or other tunings can change the shapes for sure. However, for a casual guitarist, we can just concentrate on standard tuning and learn all the music theory that way.

For piano, I only know of Just Intonation and Equal Temperament, which still have the notes in the same orders. Although theoretically you could string and tune a piano differently....

>Strobe by Deadmau5

I'm sure you've already seen it but in case you haven't, Evan Duffy's rendition of this on YouTube is inspiring. Also check out The Veldt.

https://youtu.be/mTwoMGCtPT8

In a somewhat recent A16z podcast episode[0] the CEO of Twilio dropped that more than half of the developers they surveyed played a musical instrument and 3/4 or so “did some sort of artistic thing on the side”.

I feel like I’m unlucky since the vast majority of the devs I accidentally cross paths with IRL somehow do not have such interests.

[0] https://a16z.com/2021/01/12/rise-of-developers-creative-clas...

I have heard the same but also made the same observations. Something seems to be off.

Hmm, I agree that having different interests is cool, but I don't know if I agree that this isn't the confirmation of a stereotype. In fact the subjects here are surprisingly predictable. Music? Jazz, piano, rock. Other hobbies? Woodworking, cooking, gaming, watching anime. Misc knowledge? Physics, animal behavior, Atlas Obscura. Philosophy? Stoicism, existentialism, analytical philosophy, random best-seller self-help gurus. Health? Life extension, gut microbiome, depression, mindfulness, neuroscience, magic mushrooms.

I'm not necessarily judging this, there's only so much one can focus on and I also find most of these subjects fascinating, but it's pretty clear a tiny subset of what's out there is what consistently gets to the frontpage.

I find that there is a huge cross-over between programming and music. IIRC, someone told me years ago, that the most common non-CS degree among programmers was music. I can't verify it, but my experience does not belie it either.

I haven't seen that in The Netherlands, where I studied. But I did meet some fellow guitar players during my degree :)

Music and programming have a couple of things in common. The most important thing being: the act of creating something. Anyone who's a creator at heart will be interested by many endeavours that allow you to create. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a disproportionate amount of woodworkers among software engineers (as opposed to among laywers, for example).

The thing is, not every programmer is a programmer because he/she wants to create. There are other aspects to programming that might be interesting to some.

Your point about the commonality is "the act of creating something" is really touching. I really value the character to being "brave" to get creative, and also knowing that you can do/make/change things to the way you want / make it better.

I can see how it relates to various "creation" activities like cooking, painting, electronics/arduino,film-making, or even open-discussion/forum in general (creating community through participation).

Most common non-STEM degree maybe. I'm sure there are a lot more EE/ physics/ math grads working as programmers than music grads.

One of the more surprising combos at university was Physics and Music. That was the degree, and the numbers were similar to those doing Computational Physics.

Imperial College actually used to offer a BSc Physics and Music Performance course[1] (it was suspended recently). This is notable because dual majors, even between similar/adjacent academic fields, are rare for UK undergraduate degrees.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/physics-departme...

If you don't purely do piano and do synthesizers, and write music with DAWs, there's even more crossover. You "program" drums/synths. That's literally what they call it, even though it's conceptually somewhat different. I got into it only to realize it's very similar to "work".

I feel like it's also a stereotype that mathy nerds play piano and violin when they're younger.

I've been listening to the Huberman Lab podcast[0] recently, and in one of the earlier episodes he talks a lot about how to create the environment for neuroplasticity in the adult brain. I've only listened to most episodes once so I hope I'm not misrepresenting him, and this is simplified, but a critical component of causing the release of the chemical bath which allows for robust neuroplasticity is making errors, an experience which should feel a bit uncomfortable. "Errors are the basis of neuroplasticity." Without that focused set of attempts and discomfort of trying to do something and failing, the brain isn't getting the high quality signal that it needs to do some rewiring because the current networks simply aren't making the cut.

This is at odds with a quote from OP's second point:

> If you keep making mistakes when practicing then you are just going to get good at making them, so it’s best to avoid them in the first place.

That aside, the article seems like great advice. With Huberman's account of encouraging adult neuroplasticity in mind, my thinking would be to amend this method towards going just fast enough to be able to do the chunk of music but not so slow that the attempts are free of errors. And probably the errors should be of one type at a time? Instead of erring in dynamics and fingering and articulation all at once, try to get everything right except for one aspect. For that, attempt to surpass your abilities and err.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/AndrewHubermanLab/featured

Edit: Said another way, “perfect practice makes perfect,” where you aim to play perfectly but consistently just barely fall short. The correct networks are strengthened while those tiny errors get tweaked via neuroplasticity the nights after and consistent improvement results.

Eh, I am not so sure. After watching my kid go through Suzuki Method violin through Volume 10 (a Mozart concerto) -- my observation is that it is incredibly important to not practice-in mistakes. The typical Suzuki Method attack is to identify "special spots" (you don't tell a 4-year old that it is a "difficult section") and for those special spots, identify drills that work that spot. The spot is probably 1 or 2 measures long. There are a lot of different technique-builder drills, but one example: In La Folia there is a challenging run, at performance tempo it is very fast, and the timing is a 7-tuple, if I recall. One drill is to play that scale run forwards and backwards, slowly, concentrating on perfect intonation, even timing, and percussive finger landings. Only when that drill is perfect, is that integrated into the piece.

So, no. Don't allow yourself to make mistakes. Take the challenging section, come up with a drill for just that section, and work that section until it is perfect at the same tempo where you can play the rest of the piece. The first rule of time-efficient practice is to spend your time on the sections that need perfecting! Just playing the piece through over-and-over is not a good use of practice time.

Another thing that I found a bit mind-bending, given my own music education, is that our teacher had the philosophy that first you memorize the piece, and only after the piece is completely memorized without intonation and tempo mistakes, is it possible to start really working on perfecting it. That is the point where she really started teaching the piece. Maybe that is a violinist thing where there is a culture of memorization, but it was a bit of a new concept for me.

Another teacher at a violin camp used to say: "After you first succeed, try, try again." Meaning, don't stop after you get it right! After you get it right, you need to play it correctly at least as many times as you played it incorrectly, just to reach net-zero learning. Only then can you play it correctly many more times in order to perfect it.

Ah, well, I've poorly portrayed the idea that Huberman shared on his podcast regarding neuroplasticity. I think we may even be in agreement. Lemme give this one more shot.

> Don't allow yourself to make mistakes. Take the challenging section, come up with a drill for just that section, and work that section until it is perfect at the same tempo where you can play the rest of the piece.

Work that section until it is perfect implies that when you start it's not perfect, i.e. mistakes are made. You can't just be perfect with everything all of the time. How would you even know where to start such as to "make no mistakes"? Finding perfection is the process I tried to describe above, you aim to play perfectly and get as close as possible. Nevertheless, errors are inevitable. Embrace their necessity for they are the stuff of learning.

> One drill is to play that scale run forwards and backwards, slowly, concentrating on perfect intonation, even timing, and percussive finger landings.

Reiterating, doing 50 reps of the above is bound to have some errors. You notice them, your brain notices them. If you only ever played things that you can currently do perfectly, or said differently, vacant of any mistakes, how would you ever get better or play new things which are bound to have things you can't already perfectly do?

I think what I failed to portray is that yes, don't "allow yourself to make mistakes." Care about trying to be perfect. You'll still make mistakes and that's a good thing. As you constantly improve and take on more and more challenging tasks, you're also baking in countless reps that are strengthening the "right" networks in the brain and pruning out the ones that aren't right.

I recommend checking out the podcast because I'm definitely not doing a good job of replicating his lessons / sharing of what the latest in neuroscientific literature shows.

Have you considered that you might be wrong? It's OK to be wrong (in the spirit of your post!).

I don't know what your background is with musical instruments, but there is a mental wall to break through when it comes to how "acceptable" errors should be.

Learning a piano piece is simply building up muscle memory, through repetitions.

If you practice and make mistakes, you are building up muscle memories for the wrong notes.

As a piano player, what OP says wrings very true. It's tempting to just "play the piece" to practice it, but this is very inneficient, for the reason stated above. focused repetitions is order of magnitudes faster.

Muscle memory is only one aspect of it. Muscle memory fails badly in stress or performance situations. There also has to be a solid intellectual knowledge of the piece. Mental practice can help with this.

My beloved middle school band teacher used to say: It's not "practice makes perfect," but rather, "practice makes permanent."

Granted I'm not a pianist, but a jazz bassist. So I see it in light of the technical problems of the bass, which include intonation and tone formation. My approach is, if I'm struggling with a passage, I don't just keep playing it over and over. Rather, I stop and try to analyze what's hard about it, and what I'm doing wrong with my technique. Then I work on correcting those problems.

This is also what my kids' teachers do during lessons. Part of the reason for lessons is to learn a better approach to practicing.

A lot depends on what kind of music you're playing, but I often don't know what I'll be playing until I find out at the performance. The bassist is often the one who's expected to roll with whatever the rest of the band chooses. So the mastery of specific pieces can't just be an end unto itself, but it also has to pay off in improving my ability to approach the next piece. This requires making real progress on technique.

Failure should be a part of learning and we should learn to embrace failure.

My poster child example of this is tracking falling down when ice skating / skiing.

Not falling is a poor metric of success as you see many people not fall but are also clearly not ice skating. Falling is to some extent a metric of how hard you are pushing yourself.

With instruments, practising mistakes can be costly because establishing muscle memory is habit formation and baking in mistakes is essentially inefficient in your time spent learning.

As my teacher would say "practise like you are up on the stage in front of thousands. Perform like you are alone at home in your pyjamas."

Don't be afraid to make mistakes, but always practise smart. (FWIW I spent the best part of 15+ years NOT practising smart)

But the goal isn't neuroplasticity, it's to play a single song. If you're looking to compose or improvise, then sure. Otherwise, learn to play without mistakes. I spent many years accepting errors in my playing and now wish I'd been more intentional in my practice habits.

I think there tends to be some confusion in this aspect of piano study. Of course people are going to make mistakes when learning. The trick is to note them, fix them, and then practice the correct version. Don't spend any time practising errors. At least that's how I think of it. A great book on the subject is "The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self" by William Westney. He believes worrying too much about being flawless on the initial playing causes anxiety in students. Being ok with errors helps people relax and makes them less likely to give up.

I assume when he mentions the Piano Street forums, he's talking about people like Bernhard. The guy was a legend. Some of his posts are collected here by topic: https://pianoselfteached.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/contents/. But, the information density is rather low, so besides the repertoire suggestions I recommend skipping it. This blog does a great service by distilling all his ideas into a short post.

For a book-length treatment along the same lines, there's Chuan C. Chang's Fundamentals of Piano Practice: http://www.pianopractice.org/. His daughters won state piano competitions using these practice techniques. Beware, though, that there are a few crazy tidbits sprinkled in (for example, his claim that if you practice piano while sick, you might cause brain damage). But most of it is useful.

While this method sounds effective, it's not very enjoyable.

As a "for fun" piano player, I just like to power through a song slowly, as far as I can get (not stopping for minor mistakes or even skipping notes). Side effect of this is that it has made my sight reading very good.

Here’s a trick I like: start at the end. I practice the ending a few times, then once I’m happy with it I go back one measure and play from there, and so on.

The result is that playing gets easier as you go.

Definitely a 'Your Mileage May Vary' moment here. On guitar, I used to 'slog' rather than 'power through' a song. It took weeks before it came close to sounding like music. Now I start with a couple (tough) bars (think Doc Watson, Deep River Blues) and that bit sounds like music in a day or two. Plus, I find muscle memory develops much more quickly when I play the same bit over in a short time span.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VAbrnjdtYw

I agree completely. I play several instruments, and when I learned I wouldn't have been able to motivate myself to do it if I was just practicing small sections over and over again. I might have taken twice as much time to gain the same skill level, but in my opinion, finding the motivation to improve is harder than actually improving at most skills.

I'm a classically trained pianist, and this is good advice.

I'd also suggest doing exercises periodically to improve the independence and coordination of your fingers - chord balancing (progressing from 3 notes to 5) and Hanon were particularly helpful for me. (You can google chord balancing and Hanon if you're unfamiliar.)

Totally agree that exercises are good and sometimes mistakenly ignored by people.

Although I'd like to also note that the best practice method is what works for one and are actually used by the person.

Especially if someone is not going to be a concert pianist, to enjoy practice & playing is invaluable IMO.

This article does a good job of describing an approach which is useful if you have lots of willpower, limited time, and want to learn to play a complicated piece exactly as written.

I'm occasionally in that situation, in which case I use this approach, but at least for me this is a small portion of my practicing. Instead, I try to make sure I sit down at the piano at least once a day, and play whatever I want. The goal is to have fun, and let my fingers learn how to play by giving them a lot of time. If I have more willpower, I'll try harder things, occasionally stopping and slowly working through something that feels just a little bit too hard for me, but even when I just play I'm building familiarity and fluidity.

(This isn't specific to piano: it works with any instrument)

These are great tips from someone who is a great player and has experience teaching the piano, but I'd also add that you need to also practice the theory behind the piece, specially for modern music as this speeds up the process of learning the piece.

Also, we all have very different objectives when approaching piano playing. Some will want to perform live with a band, others having just some fun at home and some will try and become classical concertists. Different goals, different approaches IMHO.

I am a casual piano player and use the Simply Piano app (which is amazing btw, way beyond my expectations) and I do hate playing slow. Lately I try to play any piece at first sight at the original tempo, even though I make many mistakes, I started doing this for more complex songs/pieces and I realized that my sight-reading improved by a lot and that when I go back to easier songs I can play them without any mistake in the first try. I am not saying this is the way to go if you want to become a great classical pianist, but for the casual player that just wants to learn fast to be able to play some songs, I find that trying to force your brain into quickly recognizing patterns and quickly making the correct movements works pretty well.

This is a great article, one I wished I read a long time ago after a lot of inefficient learning.

One thing I'm still keeping an eye out for is how to best learn when time is limited.

As I get older, free time is at a premium, with job/kids/life/etc. meaning that some days even 20m practice is a luxury. So I've always been curious how to make the most of that and unexpected slots of free time.

Should I just work on technical exercises/scales? Have a set of things written down to work on in case free time appears? Follow the advice in the article? Or accept that nothing worthwhile can be done in such short time and noodle around?

I am in same situation as you. What keeps me going is practicing songs that I enjoy. If I am working on a song that I enjoy, I am excited to pick up the guitar and am more or less able to find time every day. I also see progress because I am learning what I enjoy.

Sweet! This is basically the same as my method. I studied piano up to about Grade 5 RCM, but then was married to a very good pianist for ~15 years and got to listen to her play and practice. Have spent the last few years just doing Hanon's piano exercises as meditation. Finally starting to learn pieces again, with a method very similar to this article. Was going to write an article, but now I don't have to, plus I get validation.

My upstairs neighbour is a more advanced pianist, but plays the same stuff again and again way past the point of diminishing returns IMHO. Don't bang your head against a wall. Do some short, efficient practice, then sleep on it. You will automagically be better the next day.

The point about not repeating mistakes is key. It's much slower to unlearn than to not have learned the glitches in the first place. Your brain doesn't know the difference between repetition and training. Anything you repeat is training.

Also, the point about playing faster resonates with me. I just love playing exercises faster and faster for no particular reason. That said you could compare it to a test-pilot expanding the flight envelope. By pushing past cruising speed, you increase your natural cruising speed. Your error rate will go up, so it's important not to spend too long pushing it, but when you slow back down, you'll feel like you have more time, and be less stressed -- feeling less like you're barely holding on and about to crash.

EDIT> Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Mindful, efficient practice is key.

I was (initially) forced to learn piano from the age of 5... but, by God, was I glad that my parents did this. The article covers pretty much exactly what I - and my teachers - worked out over a number of years. And the basic approach works for any instrument. It's a real boon coming to other instruments - electric bass is my main instrument now - with a grounding in not only music theory but also the 'how to' learn pieces / parts / songs.

Interesting discussion as a lot of people have their own secret sauce. I'll add mine.

. Practice at least five minutes a day. Doing it often is more important than rare, longer sessions. OTOH, Paul Desmond claimed to never practice because it made him play too fast. Go figure.

. One way to slow down a song for learning is simply to divide the speed by two. That keeps the clock more locked in.

. Learning tunes is valuable. Reading is useful but can also be a crutch. Playing songs you actually know frees up brain power for playing.

. Lessons aren't particularly valuable. Time in harness is.

. Backing tracks make really good metronomes.

. The only use of a computer I would bother with, aside from as a playback device, is software that slows down without changing pitch. Transcribe! is useful.

. On that note, transcribing will greatly improve your ear.

. Don't get too involved with gear porn websites.

. Playing with other people is a good thing.

. Record yourself. It keeps you honest.

. There are industries out there devoted to selling equipment, magic software, instruments, video lessons. Ignore them.

. Time matters more than notes.

. School band programs have limited value. They are mostly setup to deal with large numbers simultaneously and to impress parents. Use at your peril.

My sax teacher has me play the leading notes of the next bar after what I'm actually practicing. It makes a big difference.

On the piano I'm currently learning how to put a walking bass on the left hand side with a melody on the right. It's really challenging. One problem with playing it slowly is that it produces clashing notes that sound wrong but will disappear once being played at the correct speed.

Honestly I don't have strict rules to practice. I'm learning the 3rd movement of K310 by just playing it with the sheet from beginning to end with both hands. Once I get fast and comfy with it I'll start playing it avoiding eye-contact with the sheet as best I can until I can drop the sheet completely. Then it starts to be really motivating to play the piece again and again and I'll experiment with different tempos, with or without the metronome, with different numerical sounds and tone transpositions. Playing eyes closed is interesting too but I rarely think of doing it. I don't want to be strict and write down rules to follow, if I don't think about it I don't do it.

I don't really agree with "you are never going to get around to “fixing” it later" because I do that all the time, I make lots of mistakes all the time and I just don't care because I know I'll fix them later. Glenn Gould trained sometimes with background noise like TV or radio to avoid hearing his mistakes.

Professional pianist Tiffany Poon has a channel where she posts some of her practice sessions with why she does certain things:

* https://www.youtube.com/c/TiffanyPoonpianist/videos

Just wanted to add my two cents here. This is great advice for classical piano (or any other instrument) practice. It does not apply to Jazz Piano playing at all though, in Jazz you should avoid falling into the trap of repetition. Playing slowly and clean, yes, repetition? Not so much.

The author's advice is fantastic for learning a specific song, note for note as written. @MrGrando is smart to point out that Jazz and other forms of music are much more about free expression and improvisation. A level above the author's practice would be to start understanding the structure of the piece from a music theory standpoint. The relationship between the notes becomes the important element and you begin to see things like a II V I chord progression. By understanding the structure, you realize you can improvise on implied scales, transpose to other keys and harmonize with new chords to add your own creativity.

That's exactly it. I have to say that the highest-level classical performers reach that level, but through different means. Not the improvisational part, but harmonically, understanding what the voices are doing in a counterpoint Bach passage for example.

In classical you're an interpreter, and that's very challenging.

In Jazz, you're an interpreter of an improvisation, which is like composing in real-time. I also have to point out that the great classical composers did improvise a lot, and that trend was lost with time but is documented if you research Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin for instance.

I thought most jazz pianists start out classically trained and then branch out into jazz later in life. Is the training methods for classical not a good foundation for jazz?

Hey,

I would say that it's a mix, and now things have been formalized a lot in the realm of Jazz (that's a whole subject on its own).

I would say that classical training can definitely help a lot from an interpretation standpoint, there are many technical and harmonic concepts that definitely hold. Some classical repertoire probably helps more and has more parallels to Jazz too.

Something that I have to emphasize though, is that you can be quite proficient at playing classical piano and also have a not very sophisticated harmonic understanding ("interpreter v/s composer"), that understanding is required if you're doing Jazz.

Some examples of non-classically trained Jazz pianists that are incredibly relevant: Thelonius Monk, Art Tatum.

On the other hand, many important Jazz Pianists had extremely relevant classical training. Jarrett being one of the greats and I would mention Brad Mehldau as someone who's extremely influenced by classical as well, and who's still alive and expanding the language of Jazz.

Regarding the "training methods", I would say that the classical training methods are problematic if they're tried to be applied to learning jazz. The successful student will have to adapt and drop a lot of them to learn improvisation, which in the end is the essence of the jazz language.

I’ve always been taught to spend >50% time practice hand separate first, increase tempo one hand at a time, and only combine after much practice, which seems to differ than the post. Does anyone have a view on how soon to jump into two hands when learning a new piece?

I never practice with separate hands. My experience is that muscle memory kind of resets anyway once the other hand joins. So why bother?

I prefer practicing in a super slow tempo but with both hands right from the start.

> My experience is that muscle memory kind of resets anyway once the other hand joins.

I’ve never heard anyone suggest that before, and it is certainly not my experience.

It’s highly subjective but it’s also certainly not just me.

From [1]:

> Your experience is quite typical. Playing two hands at the same time is completely different than playing both separately.

But the point of learning parts separately is NOT about making it easier to play both hands together. It's about learning all the "other" stuff (like correct hand position, articulation etc.) without having the distraction of the second hand.

From [1] but another person:

> Put another way, instrument playing is a conscious action, controlled by our executive function, and we only have one area of the brain that controls the executive function. Thus, homo sapiens's conscious control is, for better or worse, unitary, and we cannot do two independent tasks at once.

> The same is true for the piano.

From [2]:

> Hands separate practices the aural knowledge, or aural memory; and the intellectual. It practices physical on a smaller level, because you aren't practicing the coordination between two hands, but rather the security of one hand alone. But I think the amount it gives to physical knowledge is small enough that it doesn't really count as a method for improving that knowledge.

[1] https://music.stackexchange.com/q/53699/ [2] https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=28007.0

Sorry, I'm just unconvinced. There is no doubt that learning, for example, a Chopin Etude with the busiest hand alone is going to be a natural step before adding the second hand. Think about the reverse, would you expect someone who can play both hands together well to also be able to play them separately? Muscle memory does not disappear just because you add a second hand. The coordination does have some differences, but it's hardly a totally separated phenomenon.

> There is no doubt that learning, for example, a Chopin Etude with the busiest hand alone is going to be a natural step before adding the second hand.

To me, the phrases “There is no doubt that” and “natural” come across as if a certain amount of debate might be warranted.

> would you expect someone who can play both hands together well to also be able to play them separately?

Some may be able to, some not so easily. Think of a Bach fugue whose middle voice sometimes alternates across both hands. I’d say it heavily depends on the player and the piece.

> Muscle memory does not disappear just because you add a second hand.

Good point. I think my choice of words was poor when I claimed muscle memory would reset. What I do claim is that some people, myself included, experience friction in their muscle memory when they move between practicing both hands and a single hand.

> Think of a Bach fugue whose middle voice sometimes alternates across both hands. I’d say it heavily depends on the player and the piece.

It's ironic as I was actually thinking of my own experiences learning Bach fugues and how, when I learned the hands separately, it seemed to help a lot. Especially since finger technique with Bach is so technical and how you choose your fingering is critical, it's hard to master that for both hands simultaneously. After all, you are still using the same fingers when you add the two hands together, so giving yourself a chance to focus on just one hand seemed to always help me a lot -- not just help me, but actually was a requirement to getting it learned. I don't think I could have ever learned some of those intricate fugues if I'd done both hands together. Or at least, it would have taken longer. For example, which is easier, sight reading music with both hands, or sight reading each hand separately?

> For example, which is easier, sight reading music with both hands, or sight reading each hand separately?

That highly depends on the performer and the musical properties of the work.

Sight reading a single voice can be harder than with both hands because the voice of one hand may not always give you a complete picture: what the tonal center and functions are, how a theme or sequence develops, and how the voices relate to each other.

I mean, from a technical level, it’s hard to argue that playing a single voice, or single hand, requires less effort than sight reading multiple voices or two hands simultaneously.

From a technical level, you’re obviously right.

But when sight reading, there’s a lot more going on than just technical skill. Depending on the person who is sight reading and which piece, playing both voices at the same time can, on an intellectual level, help tremendously with comprehension that it more than offsets the additional technical burden.

Should young children be “forced” to learn piano?

That verb “forced” invites an answer in the negative, but music is a wonderful gift that brings so much joy and social opportunity.

Music is best learned young. But what if a child says no to lessons?

I didn’t say yes and I see now that I cost myself a lot of joy.

Or perhaps you have managed to keep the joy and music related. I've seen people who learned piano in music school and as soon as they have passed theier final exams they forgot about it and never came back to piano because they learned to hate it during their "education". Contrary to that I said "no" to a bad teacher and enjoy plaing music to this day. I do not have a perfect training but still enjoy to learn and play when I can.

I believe though such "hard" choice should be avoided if possible. One should have a good teacher and with a good teacher you do not need to "force" anything because it is a joy to learn.

Unfortunately I didn't have access to such teacher so I had to learn by myself and it's not easy because when you stuck you have to figure out how to move forward. It happens from time to time and right now for instance I am really puzzled about what to learn next and I do not know where to get a good advice that is "workable" in my current situation.

> Music is best learned young.

In what way? When I was a kid, I would have been a horrible music student. I was interested in 500 things and music wasn't one of them.

I eventually bought a guitar when I was around 25 and took lessons. When it's something you want to do and you have songs you want to play, it's a much different experience.

I don't think I would want to trade the thousands of hours I spent playing with legos, swimming, riding my bike or doing any of the other things I did as a kid (including more passive things like reading books and playing video games).

So to answer your initial question, no I don't think kids should be forced to play any instrument with a few exceptions. Childhood is too short.

I took classical cello lessons as a kid. Today, I'm a jazz bassist and I perform regularly but it's not my career. I would not be able to function on the bandstand without that background. Both of my kids took classical lessons, both are quite accomplished and enjoy playing.

I believe it's comes down to all families, and kids, being different. My own view is that parents should be perceptive to their kids preferences, and whether they are really enjoying something or not. But some kids need to be "forced" to experience new things, and some need to be "forced" to keep working on something, even when it's something that they genuinely enjoy. Whether it can be done in a beneficial or harmful way depends on the way that each family functions.

I kept up with music lessons through high school, but my other activity was figure skating, which I didn't enjoy. My mom let me drop out of figure skating, so it's clear that the "forcing" had its limits, and was only occurring within reason.

Do you like classical music? And, do you know what it's like to be a musician? Because if your kids study classical music, you'll be hearing a lot of it. If you have visceral "yuck" response to classical music, it might not be right for your family.

And of course there are infinitely many ways to approach music, that are not classical music. For instance, the instruments of popular music tend to be easier to learn by older kids and adults, and can be learned with or without lessons.

There is something about the neuroplasticity of children that lends itself to some kinds of learning, but I think we're discovering that there aren't even any hard rules about that.

As someone who was "forced" to learn classical piano while young I think I will do the same for my kids.

At age 12 I asked to learn violin instead and did, now playing folk music as a hobby is how I met my wife and the basis of my social life now (playing in two bands).

That being said, I look to my friends who played team sports from an early age and get great joy playing in a football team and feel like I missed out on that part of our culture.

Classical piano training is a great way to take joy away from music.

> Use the correct fingering, dynamics, articulation, etc. from the very beginning; you are never going to get around to “fixing” it later.

As both a piano player and language learner I am often torn about this. On the one hand it’s better not to give your brain a chance to learn the “wrong” way, because then you trip up on that section over and over. But for language, my experience is that people who speak prolifically, even if it’s badly wrong, do better than those who speak less but make sure it’s always correct. I would love to know if there is any evidence as to which is better, and if it’s different for language than other skills like piano.

Language is different because people tend to be very forgiving of strangers with poor pronunciation and grammar. As long as you can make yourself understood, no one cares if you're not speaking like a local.

If you really do want to speak like a local you'll need lessons from a professional voice coach - not just a language teacher - who will teach you how to move your mouth muscles to make the correct sounds. While some talented people can work this out for themselves, most people can't.

Piano is the equivalent of having to work it out for yourself. Muscle memory of right-notes-in-the-right order is the start of musicality, not the end of it. You have to master that level to the point where it's unconscious before you control dynamics, tempo, and evenness - which are the performance details that make a performance successful and expressive, as opposed to sort-of-competent.

This is good, standard advice (if you can play it slowly...)

Once this is done and the notes are under your fingers, though, most pianists would probably say you have about 80% of the work on a piece left. The next most important thing next is to train your ears to get yourself to the next level. I highly recommend recording yourself in small ~30 second chunks and identifying what you want to change. At this point most progress will be made from listening and analysis, not from fingers on keys.

Of course, this is hard work and requires proper motivation and training, for which a good teacher has no substitute.

probably not the most efficient way to learn pieces, but sometimes i like to just read through one to two pages a couple times, every day. after about a week that section is mostly memorized, depending on the density of the music. then i can sit with it and let the fingerings i like naturally evolve. im a guitarist, so i think fingerings are a little more complicated and contextual sometimes. the constraints of the left hand, and the multiple positions to play a single note really up the possibilities. all the things mentioned in the article are good and in my experience mostly correct, except the fingerings, but that probably varies by person. i have two additional pieces of advice for fast passages, if you keep messing them up:

- make sure you can subdivide the bar in a couple different rhythms. often ill realize there is some kind of rhythmic discomfort i havent fully smoothed out. for starters, make sure you can tap your foot on the quarters. if you feel any hesitation or discomfort, then there's your problem.

- refinger something. its sometimes hard to know if a fingering is going to work at fast tempos, so just try a different one if the current one you are using isnt gelling. for a phrase maybe a bar long, id give it 3 days and if it isnt improving, id start to think about reworking it.

This is also pretty much exact same advice as one should use for learning touch typing. I was stuck on some lesson because I was trying to go too quickly and kept mistyping. It's said in many places that you should go slow enough to not make mistakes. Once I did that, I went ahead just fine.

By the way, touch typing took about a month to learn, twenty minutes a day—though of course a few more months to get used to it, in practice. (As for playing music, however—never managed that.)

Some comments have mentioned memorising the piece which helps a great deal. One major difference I employ in my practice is this:

Instead of speeding up, I speed down. I play the section of notes as chords (which is the fastest you can go). Then I gradually slow down by rotation of my hand as I'm discovering the fingering dynamics. I find this to be considerably faster for me. I find it hard to speed up and never do so enough when starting slow.

I'm by no means an expert but this has helped me

I've been making a VR piano app to help with my own practicing. I find that it helps to see the recorded hands moving in 3d space in front of you. I can also slow down the movements to make it easier to replicate. It's certainly easier than learning sheet music! Here's a video if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBmjtgb2rA

In some cases, practicing some things slowly is more exhausting and less efficient than starting at at least medium speed from the very beginning. The slow tempo loses you mental oversight of what you are trying to play.

You'll learn when this is through experience. If you can't wrap your head around the super slow practicing, try to practice it at a much higher tempo. Still need to be super accurate about fingerings though!

> The slow tempo loses you mental oversight of what you are trying to play.

When I was a drummer, I used to think that too, but it turned out to be false most of the time. If I really wanted to make something sound good in a fast tempo, I had to make it sound perfect in a slower tempo.

My teacher used to say "if you can play it fast, make sure you can also play it slow"

But, as always, it depends.

The original article spoke of piano. I should have mentioned that the advice I gave is more tailored to polyphonic instruments like the guitar, the piano and the accordion. Even on these instruments, the best advice in most cases usually is to practice slowly at first. Just not always. That's what 20 years of teaching the guitar has taught me.

What do you think about applications like Simply Piano? I am 40+ yo, and never played any instrument before. After 3 years of practicing with Simply Piano I am able to read and play some sheet music, but I'd like to know which areas need improvements.

Do you know any applications which can record performance of a song and evaluate it?

I don't think this is a solved problem yet, in terms of technique. You may well be pressing the keys in the right order, at the right time, and with the right dynamics, but there's a lot to playing technique that is about your hand position and movement which isn't detectable via MIDI capture.

I've been a guitar teacher for 20 years, and I've seen people who are incredible players with terrible technique. Yes, that means it's possible to play well by doing so badly, but with the right technique (which is still being developed in some areas), there's a whole lot of improvement that could happen, or the player in question could play for longer (both in the short term, and longer term because of injury).

Only complex video / 3D capture of your hand position and movement would solve this, and as far as I'm aware this doesn't exist yet.

Find a good teacher, even if it's just for the occasional lesson. With the right teacher (and this is horses for courses), you'll make much more progress, even if you still use the app.

(All IMO, of course!)

Here is a book I happen to own (and I recommend highly), on the general topic of how to practice piano effectively.

"The Practice Revolution: Getting great results from the six days between lessons", by Philip Johnston. It contains a lot of advice including some overlap with some of the comments in this thread.

Did some classical training when younger and I would maybe add one thing about broader strategies of being a musician in general:

Spend up to 1/3 of time with fundamentals (eg scales)

Spend at least 1/3 of time with learning pieces (like this article describes)

Finally spend the rest of the time with just playing and improvising on the piano.

Some tricks that have worked for me with other instruments.

* Learn how to make random note sequences sound good. With the right timing and fingering it's usually possible.

* Spend time jamming to develop improvisation skills and musicality.

* Focus on the parts of the music that are hard rather than trying to play through.

I think your first bullet points out an undervalued skill. So much time is spent on rote learning when I think improvisation should be encouraged once the very basics have been learned.

I think this is an effective method, but too boring for most amateurs, including myself. I have used something like this for Bach, because there's basically no way to fudge your way through full counterpoint like that, but otherwise...no thanks.

I started playing piano in February/March and since 'real' lessons are out of the question right now, I wanted to learn it the right way. I looked around and I didn‘t wanted it to be a party trick, where I can play 3 songs by heart and that‘s it. I found pianote and to me it‘s one of the best teaching sites about a particular subject I‘ve ever seen. They take so much time to teach you the fundamentals and their progression path with 'The Method' makes learning fun and challenging. If you‘re looking for a good online course, I think there‘s no better one out there. Even a friend of mine, who plays drums in a band heard of it and said he only heard good things about it. I practice almost everyday and pianote is the best investment in myself I did in a long time.

edit: ah well, the HN downvote army comming in for voicing my experience on the subject discussed, what can you do... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This sounds like a fake review. They cost 200$ yearly to get the books or 30$ per month for online material. I guess the pricing may be ok for the US but for eastern Europe you can get learning materials for way less

Haha, I knew my post had the potential to be taken the wrong way...and its not $200 for 'books' but for hours upon hours of video learning material, live sessions with teachers, backing tracks for your practice songs, PDFs with practices for your particular lesson and so on. I‘m just really a fan of the site and wanted to share my experience, and no I haven’t been paid to write this text on my 5yrs old account with 100 karma. :)

p.s yes I‘m not a native speaker

While I do not speak on behalf of Pianote, there is definitely no paid shilling going on, it may be the case that the OP is a non-native english speaker, and in that way the tone comes across differently. As for the cost, I would definitely say Pianote's goal is to be a pianote lesson replacement, and in that way the content is cheaper, hopefully for a better/different experience than what you'd get taking sit down lessons

I got the books and I was _very_ (pleasantly) surprised by the quality of materials and the print. I think they alone could cost as much but you fet the access to the many hours of the quality online content. I thibk they really do care.

I'm a mobile dev at Pianote, glad you enjoyed the experience! Do checkout the mobile app

Hey man, I really like the mobile app but I also bought an iPad specifically for learning, cause the mobile screen is just to small for me to practice comfortably. Is there an iPad app in the works? Best regards to your whole team. You do an amazing job!

hey thank you! the mobile app should work all the same on iPad as well, it is cross platform :) rare that i hear from a user directly so that's pretty cool

Strange...just installed it on my iPad. Don‘t know why I didn‘t find it earlier. :) It‘s also a total surprise to me that you saw my post, I still consider HN niche among my frontend dev peers. Anyway so far everything, the app, the website and ofc the courses themself have been a joy to learn with. And again great work and best wishes to the whole team!

This is how I practice, in the rare times that I have the discipline to do so systematically. Most of the time, I start from the top and play until I get tired. So I'm always better at the earliest parts of pieces.

> If you only play the piece fast, the piece will deteriorate as mistakes inevitably get introduced and never get fixed.

I know this and I experienced it first hand (pun intended) but I don't understand why it happens.

The underlying motor sequence is learned and probabilistic based on prior sequences that you actually played. Therefore if you introduce a mistake early it will be one of the set of motor sequences that can occur following the start of the sequence. The faster you go the less time you have to anticipate and correct an upcoming mistake. This can happen at even fairly low speeds as soon as you cross the threshold where you can no longer consciously determine what motor movement happens next in the sequence.

An extremely overly simplistic model would be something like, let's say you play a sequence 10 times and make a single mistake. You now have a 10% chance on any future run of making that mistake. However if you do, then you probability of making that mistake goes up in the future. Assume that you can reduce that 10% slighly by applying top down (conscious) attention if you play at some reasonable pace. Playing faster means that you can't use any top down feedback to reduce the probability of the incorrect sequence from occurring.

Under stress (e.g. during a competition) you may not be able to dedicate enough attention to keep the incorrect sequences in check, so the mistakes reappear at the worst possible time. This also happens if you get angry because you made a mistake.

The best way to avoid this is to never make a mistake in the first place.

For once this isn't entirely off-topic:

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

One important piece of advice is missing: sleep. So many times I've struggled with a certain piece, only to be able to play it flawlessly the following day.

This is a surprisingly simple idea for learning pieces higher than my current level.

> If it’s too easy to memorize, choose a bigger section.

This doesn't work with fast passages where the pianist must feel how to use the momentum to their advantage. Better path-- choose a small enough section that may be played immediately at the preferred tempo.

> Practice the section slowly enough, at first, to avoid making mistakes.

By playing a bite-sized segment of music at the preferred performance tempo from the outset, the pianist can greatly simplify the entire section in the author's step 2 here.

Example of the problem:

1. Pianist breaks up a difficult passage in the development section of the 3rd movement of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata and applies a comfortable, sensible fingering.

2. Pianist ramps up the tempo.

3. Eventually, pianist hits a critical tempo where the fingering turns out to work against the momentum of their hand.

4. Pianist realizes that the new momentum of the faster tempo opens up a new possibility for a fingering-- e.g., just throw the thumb at a new position and let the torque from the forearm land it correctly. If the rest of the arm/shoulder stays loose that torque is a strong and reliable way to reposition the hand.

5. Pianist now has learned two fingerings that compete in their muscle memory-- one for the wrong tempo, which they learned first and methodically ratcheted up, and one for the right tempo which is newer and must be drilled more than the old fingering.

6. Pianist drills away at new fingering alone in a practice room.

7. New fingering becomes comfortable and seemingly secure.

8. Pianist goes plays at a different location, in front of other people, and that wrong fingering stabs at their brain like a black magic spell.

This is all avoided by a) practicing small segments of music at the preferred tempo b) joining them together to divide and conquer the piece.

Anyway, this is a common problem for a few reasons:

1. Pianists have a general reluctance to choose very small segments of music to practice.

2. Pianists have a propensity to choose pieces that are too difficult for their current skill level. This means they won't come armed with general-purpose fingerings for virtuosic passages, making them likely to choose wrong fingerings when starting to learn virtuosic passages at slow tempos.

3. Music cognition is an early science. Most amateur pianists know the feeling of playing something wrong even once and then feeling how their body somehow memorizes that mistake and haunts their entire practice. But even professional pianists don't have a shortcut for turning that experience on its head-- i.e., there's no way to play a thing correctly once and have one's body memorize that feeling as solidly as it memorizes a single mistake!

Oh hai! This is your daily site's cookie/privacy pop-up analysis:

(-) site does "legitimate interest" toggle shenanigans which are defaulted to ON and there is no disable/disagree to all for them.

(+) the "non-legitimate" interests have a disagree to all.

These are things I will not stand for, ergo I care not to read the website, since it is disrespecting my time and expects me to show each and every "vendor" to checked whether it has "legitimate interest" toggle, and to manually turn it off. No. I'm sick of it. To hell with your website.

Signed,

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