Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

I’m a father of two children, a nine and two year old, and none of us know how to play piano. I did play a woodwind for five years in and out of school, and did extracurricular music for many years - even from a young age.

Now, I’d like my son to learn piano as his first instrument. I imagine the theory and complexity of chords thrust on the pianist must be a good foundation for music in general - certainly I’m fine with my kids departures to any other instrument and mastery isn’t itself the goal.

Is this app the right tool? It doesn’t explicitly market to this segment. However, there are a number of other apps out there I’ve considered as well, including PianoMarvel mentioned elsewhere.

Surely, 1:1 lessons will be recommended - and I imagine they have their place - but I’d prefer to lean a bit harder into self-guided / app-guided and augment with a human tutor as necessary. My experience was that my tutored sessions were a bit wasteful (I wasn’t a disciplined student, and certainly wasted a lot of time and money).

My ideal setup is either an iMac or iPad and an electric piano.

Anecdotal, but maybe it'll help

I had a goal of introducing my kids to piano, and also wanted to pick it back up myself (I'd been forced to as a kid and hated it, never progressed beyond beginner).

I got myself a casio privia (it's a costco special 88 weighted keys, was the reddit recommendation for beginners at the time). Then paid for lessons with a teacher for my family which by far outweighed the cost of the keyboard.

About 10 years later: rest of family have given up piano, they didn't progress far, and i didn't do any forcing; but it was nice to hear them play when they did. I've kept it up although progress is very slow.

I think my feelings are: - I could have spent more on the piano (my dad got a significantly more expensive piano, and it is more pleasurable to play): quieter keys, better action on the keys. - I feel pretty good about how far my the rest of my family progressed, and am happy that i didn't push - I feel like a teacher somewhat forces you to keep practising even when you don't want, and maintains some progress, I don't think I'd get this from an app.

The teacher isn’t there to teach - you could do that on your own with enough time and energy. The teacher is there to preserve your passion by making sure you don’t get bogged down in easily-fixable troughs. They will hopefully have knowledge of music such that you’re always excited to play something new rather than feeling like you have to dig through a composer’s works to find something worthwhile. They provide accountability for your practice and validation for when you do well.

Ideally, you should use yourself as a guinea pig to test out the teachers in your city to find one that’s best for your kids. In reality, dumping your two-year-old on your wife to do that sucks for both of you. Your local music shop can help steer you away from teachers with bad reputations in your city.

https://youtube.com/@cedarvillemusic?si=BiZ9tF9fYcEkxcMw

This guy has thorough answers to questions no one wants to ask (e.g. Are my hands too small? What if I’m playing for others and I forget how the piece goes? Why does improvisation feel impossible to understand? How long should I practice? Should my hands hurt?).

https://web.archive.org/web/20200118023642/https://howmusicw...

This is the best explanation of music theory I’ve found and I’ve looked everywhere.

https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/core/modes/

The FAQ on the music theory Reddit has answers to questions that are largely impossible to find elsewhere. “What are modes?” is one of those questions.

In nearly any instrument it's very important to get the technique right from the start. It's incredibly easy to catch bad habits which then are much more difficult to unlearn, and will make your progress much slower and frustrating. So actually it's the other way around: pay a teacher to help him start, correct his posture/technique/etc, then later on you can wean off and continue on your own :)

I suggest an electronic keyboard with weighted keys and the free Mayron Cole lesson books.

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