10 Problems of Self-Taught Pianists (...With Solutions)

a few years ago I posted a teach yourself piano course here on YouTube and at the time it was kind of a bit of fun I thought I might learn something from doing it and I thought maybe a few hundred people might have a look at it and maybe get something out of it what I didn't expect was to be sat here kind of five or six years later in September 2023 and at this point something like one and a half million people have had some kind of contact with that course I think about 10 15,000 people have completed it in its entirety by the way it's still here it's still on YouTube it's still completely free you can find a link to the playlist in the description text down below now one way in which it has fulfilled my expectations is that it has been a learning experience for me because I have learned a huge amount about the way self- teing piano players tend to go about learning this weird instrument of ours so what we're going to do today is I'm going to take you through the 10 most common problems that self- teing piano players face what I'll do is describe each problem quite briefly and then talk you through the solution problem number one is a tendency to race now this is something that I see coming up in my emails or my comments about five or six times a week someone will drop me a message saying hey Bill I'm really enjoying your beginner's piano course and I got through lessons once to seven you know in like five days it was great I really enjoyed it but now I've got to lesson 8 and suddenly it's really hard why did you have to make lesson 8 so difficult the thing is lesson 8 isn't much more difficult than lesson 7 what's happened to that guy is that he has raced through the early lessons because they seem easy and then what's happened is that he's got to lesson eight where things just get a little bit more challenging and suddenly the the foundation that he's built isn't strong enough now the solution to this problem is to work hard especially in the early days on the basic stuff learning the note names where learning where notes are on the piano on the music staff yeah really basic stuff like that get it completely internalized and that means when you get to things that are a little bit more challenging you're not having to spend any mental energy at all working out the basics this can be a problem for adults because we have a tendency to think that if we understand something mentally we can also do it physically but that's not the case it's takes longer to really internalize something so don't race work hard on the stuff that seems easy and that will put you in a good position to make progress when things start to get difficult the second major problem is lack of Direction and this is a really common one and it stems from the fact that there is so much stuff here on YouTube for piano Learners yeah a lot of people start out trying to teach themselves piano with a kind of vague goal like you know I want to be a jazz piano player or I want to be a classical piano player and they kind of nibble around the different tutorials they search they find some they like and some they don't like and they watch a bit of one and a bit of another and they kind of end up going in circles and not making very much progress okay that's because they don't have a pathway they know they have a goal but they're unsure of the way of getting there if that is you then try following a course even if you're kind of you know really resistant to the idea of following a course at least at least it will give you a direction of travel there's my piano course like I said Here on YouTube completely free linked down below there are other people's piano courses find the one that suits you okay everybody is different if you want you could follow a book course like Alfred or the complete piano player if you absolutely have to if you absolutely have to you could even use one of the piano learning apps now I hate the apps because they encourage a button pushing mentality which is terrible I'll talk more about that later but at at least if it's all you've got at least it will give you a direction of travel and that is absolute gold problem number three is the tick of Doom now this is something that affects all amateur musicians but I think it's a particular issue for self teers what happens is you're practicing something like a piece or more likely a few individual bars or a single lick of an improvisation and suddenly you can do it you put in a lot of hard work and then you can do it and great you say tick done the thing is though it's not done and probably the next time you sit down to play it you'll find that it doesn't quite work or it falls apart that's because you need always to push past the point at which you think you have mastered something if something feels like it's got together absolutely great but practice it 20 or 30 more times yeah because that's when you really get things nailed down I talked about this technique of pushing past in a recent tutorial I'll stick a link to that down in the description text down below and it's worth following up in more detail because it's a big issue for a lot of self teers always push past the point at which you think you can play something and resist the tick of Doom problem for scales and exercises I'm awfully sorry but you're probably not doing enough of them as a self- teer is natural to say I want to play interesting stuff I don't want to do all this boring stuff like scales yeah so you tend to skip the scales and exercises and you go on to play the pieces but that can really hold you up yeah it's one of those invisible things that can hold you up exercises scales in general are really really good for you they improve your finger strength and control they improve your flexibility they improve your knowledge of different keys so if you want to get into playing scales and exercises what do you do well a good place to start might be my beginner's course cuz that's got loads of scales and exercises built into it once again Link in the description text if you're more of a deep end kind of person then you might check out the absm manual up scales broken cords and arpeggios which is rammed with this kind of stuff you might also be interested in my new project which is called exercises inventions and ideas yeah it's a whole collection of different things to help you boost up your piano skills with different drills and and and bits and pieces to have a Go on the piano keyboard warm-ups things like that um and I've deliberately created all of them so that they're actually fun to play now the very first installment of exercises inventions and ideas is Live on YouTube it takes the form of a YouTube video with an accompanying downloadable PDF yeah you can find that using the link in the description text below the thumbnail looks like this now the subsequent installments of exercises inventions and ideas they're kind of ongoing I just published a third one are only available to my patreon subscribers so this is yet another great reason to support me on patreon which doesn't cost very much but which offers you loads of great benefits also if you sign up to support me on patreon you get complimentary access to my piano packs which is really worth having so head over to patreon.com Bill Hilton to find out more about that problem number five not getting feedback now this is a major problem for self- teers because feedback is essential for all musicians it stops you going down blind Al is it corrects mistakes before they snowball it helps you to see opportunities that you might be missing but as a self teer you're by yourself so how do you get feedback I think as a self- teer you have two strategies for getting feedback and you should use both of them one of them is to get feedback from external expert musicians various ways of doing it you could approach a local piano teacher and just get a one-off lesson every now and then if you don't mind spending some money you can video yourself and post it on YouTube or Reddit you know one of the piano forums ask for feedback the other thing you can do is generate feedback for yourself and this is something something I do and it's surprisingly effective all you need to do is video yourself playing and video is better than just recording so just set up your phone there are loads of different ways of doing it you know get it on a music stands hang it above your U your piano like I do Ju Just balance it on the side of the piano anything that you can do to capture imagery and sound of yourself playing then practice something play something take the video and forget about it for a week or two weeks or a month yeah then come back to it and you'll be looking at it with fresh eyes and that is really valuable because you will notice things that you did not notice at the time when you were doing that practice or playing that piece okay it can also be surprisingly good for your morale because you look at something you've played in the past and you think actually that's pretty good so generate that feedback for yourself get that feedback from other people try to do it regularly and systematically and you will find that makes a big big difference to your progress problem number six is inefficient practice you need an attack the problem mentality so what's one of those well an attack the problem mentality means that when you are practicing you tend to focus in on stuff that you find difficult and you don't spend too much time playing through stuff that you can already do quite comfortably so let's say that you're working on a piece of music and you can play most of it pretty well there one little bit about halfway through that you keep tripping up on now the classic mistake that beginners and amateurs make is that they play through the piece they get to the mistake they say whoops I made a mistake and they go back to the beginning of the piece and they play through again then they hit the mistake again and then they go back to the beginning and that's really tempting but it's a big waste of time because you're spending most of that practice session playing through stuff you can already play much better to focus on and isolate that problem to to attack it and then when you can play it to slot it back in so literally just take out the bar or two that is causing you a problem work really hard on it and then put it back in the piece that's a much more efficient use of your practice time and if you practice efficiently you're going to make faster progress number seven the problem of unknown unknowns I'm channeling Donald Rumsfeld here now when you're learning a complex skill like the piano there are some aspects of it that you know you don't know you know that you can't play the scale of F minor in two hands you know that you can't improvise over a particular chord progression or whatever but you need to watch out for the things that you don't realize you don't know let me give you one of the kind of all-time classic examples of what I'm talking about um I'm going to be using here some sheet music that's probably quite a lot more advanced than you will be looking at if you are a beginning self- teer but it will do to illustrate the point I want to make here we have the score for shopan C minor Walt really famous piece of music and as you can see see he's written in lots of pedal markings okay I'm pretty sure this is shop not his editor by the way uh these are original he's been very clear that you need to use the sustain pedal in this piece of music moving on here is uh brahms's interet and a major on on my favorite pieces of piano music of all time and as you can see there are no pedal markings whatsoever but you still need to use the sustained pedal in this piece brahs just kind of takes it as red that you're going to use the pedal because that's kind of what kind of music it is yeah and that is something that is not obvious to you if you're self- teing okay an unknown unknown a piano teacher would tell you yeah but if you were just looking at these pieces of music as an absolute beginner you might assume that you use a pedal in this one but not in this one and that's not the case problem number eight is overestimating your weaknesses and underestimating your strengths this is a problem for adult Learners pretty much in every domain it's really easy to get into a a spiral of negativity and self-doubt and say to yourself things like oh I can't learn as quickly as I used to or I don't have time for this or people will laugh at me all of that kind of thing and all of those things may be true actually but they're probably less true than you think they are and at the same time you're probably underestimating some of your key strengths and a real strength you have as an adult is maturity you've spent many years learning how to learn and learning about how you learn and you've probably learned in particular that if you stick at something and really kind of you know make a sustained effort you tend to do at least okay in other words you've developed what scientists call grit Angela Duckworth's written This brilliant book about it which if you tend to be a doubting sort of person a self-doubting sort of person you should definitely have a look at because grit is the key advantage that gives adults or can give adult Learners of the piano the push through they need to make serious progress so yes be aware of your weaknesses but don't overestimate them and always be aware of the strengths that you bring to the table problem number nine not doing enough reinforcement now this is a big issue for adult Learners and older adult Learners in particular but it affects everybody I actually made a whole tutorial about it here on YouTube recently I'll add a link to that in the description text down below now one of the reasons that as adults we don't make as much progress as kids is that we don't have the same kind of brain plasticity that they they have okay they physiologically learn things quicker and sometimes people get depressed about that they say I'm not a kid anymore I can't learn stuff blah blah blah blah blah the fact is we can very easily compensate for that relative lack of brain plasticity by just doing more work on reinforcing our knowledge like I said earlier a big problem that adults have is that they tend to say yeah I've got that I can do it job done in fact what you need to do is go back and work on stuff that you have done earlier to reinforce it to strengthen it to keep Shoring up your foundations I often say to people who are going through the beginners course you know say they're on lesson 10 and things are a little bit tricky I say right go back to lesson six and redo 6 7 8 and 9 yeah maybe not in the same detail that you did the first time but just to re reinforce your learning and that will give you a little bit of a boost to you know kind of keep you going through the course and it works every single time so do not underestimate the importance of reinforcement practice stuff that seems obvious practice things that you think you can play pieces that you think you can Master basic stuff like practicing scales and exercises every day can make a really big difference there just don't kind of be out there at The Cutting Edge all the time be sure ing up your foundations how's that for a mixed metaphor problem 10 is the biggest one of all it's imagining that learning how to play the piano is just about pressing buttons figuring out which keys to play in which order you see this algorithmic mentality a lot on YouTube people are like yeah just tell me which notes to play but there's so much more to playing the piano than pressing buttons there's articulation Dynamics expression all of the stuff that goes into making meaningful listenable logical Musical music now the way to beat the button pushing mentality is to listen when you practice it's fatally easy to focus so hard on the physical movements that you're making that you start to ignore the sounds coming out of the piano when you listen carefully you'll start to hear how much those other things the legata the Dynamics the phrasing the expression how much they make a difference and and that should nudge you into giving them the attention they [Music] deserve so did any of that stuff kind of ring bells with you if it did let me know down in the comments because for me this learning process about how you guys learn is ongoing yeah it's always good to find out more anyway that's it subscribe to my channel if you're not subscribed already check out my social media and don't forget to check out my different products and my patreon over at patreon.com / Bill Hilton remember if you sign up to support me on patreon which doesn't cost very much then you get access to my exercises inventions and ideas installments as they're posted and you also get complimentary access to my piano packs which you can buy separately by the way there are links to them down below along with links to my various books but if you sign up and support me on patreon you get them at no extra charge okay happy piano playing well done self teers you're doing great work you need a big pat on the back keep it up I'll see you soon

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 230,272

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Id: rJwY4JEG9_Y

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023