4 Beginner Mistakes That Are KILLING Your Progress

what's up my piano friends today i'm going to teach you the top four mistakes beginners always make on piano that really hurts their progress especially for adult learners and people trying to teach themselves off of youtube and some of these are so easy to fix in just a few minutes if you know what your problem is and how to solve it and you're going to want to stick around because each mistake gets more and more important up until the final mistake which is absolutely critical for your success if you ever want to be good at piano let's start off with mistake number one which believe it or not is learning to read sheet music and i know what you're thinking you're thinking zack piano teachers always say that it's super important to learn how to read sheet music but that's because they're all teaching classical style music and yes if you want to learn how to play classical music you are going to have to read notes but if your goal is just to learn your favorite songs from the radio you know pop blues jazz rock and roll oldies these songs are much easier to learn using a simple google search and a cheat sheet that's gonna allow even a complete beginner to learn songs in a few minutes or less and this is going to save you absolute boatloads of time and let me prove it to you by the way if you've ever been to one of those dueling piano bars where people are just requesting all those random songs and they can just magically play all of them with no sheet music this is the method they're using all right so check this out let's go to this random song generator and let's just hit random music and let's take the first one blank space by taylor swift i actually really really like this song so all we gotta do is hop over to google and type in blank space chords all right and we have to click on the first one that pops up and if we scroll down boom we have the chords for the entire song so as you can see we have d then we have b m which stands for b minor and then g and then a and just like almost every pop song out there it's just going to repeat the same four chords over and over right we have d b minor g a and if we keep scrolling down we have d b minor g a and these four chords just repeat over and over so now the easy way to find these chords on piano is all we have to do is bring up the ultimate chords cheat sheet and i'll tell you where to get this cheat sheet in a bit we just find our chords so we just find d which is right here then we find b minor which is right down here and then we have to find g which is right up here and then we have to find a which is right here and boom we have our four chords to the song and so if we put these four chords by the piano all we have to do is copy these shapes all right so our first shape is d major which looks like this our next one is b minor looks like this i'm just copying the shapes from the cheat sheet and then g major which looks like this and then finally a major which looks like this and you practice those for a bit and you can already play this song nice to meet you where you been knocking show you incredible things magic madness heaven sin saw you there and i thought oh my god look at that face you look like my next mistake love's a game do you wanna play and already we got the outline to the song and now it feels a little bit sparse so to spice it up a bit let's play each chord eight times and this is a simple what's called money pattern and we'll talk more about money patterns later so we play each chord eight times now we have d major two three four five six seven eight b minor two three four five six seven eight g major two three four five six seven eight a major two three four five six seven eight now it's gonna sound a lot cooler so let's continue on with the second part of the verse [Music] you like a magazine ain't it funny rumors fly and i know you heard about me so hey let's be friends i'm dying to see how this one ends grab your passport and my hand yeah and boom you can already play blank space no sheet music necessary how much easier is that than memorizing note by note sheet music right and you can do this for any song if you like the idea of learning songs this way without sheet music hit that like button and of course there are a few other things involved you know like adding the left hand added some more you know complicated money patterns so it can sound more like this [Music] and i know if you're a beginner that probably looked really hard but trust me it's actually pretty simple to learn it's just a lot of repeated patterns but that's a little bit outside the scope of this video if you're really interested in learning that system and you want to learn a ton of songs from the radio i'll put a link here and in the description for the top three chord progressions for beginners video that goes much more in depth on this process but first we have to talk about mistake number two and this is a very important one and that involves the sloppy choppy playing that you hear from so many beginners and the cause of this is actually probably not what you think so let me ask you a question right now when you learn something on piano right and you have a tricky section is your solution to just repeat it over and over and just bang your head against the wall until it works and if so you're making it really hard on yourself okay because we can work smarter not harder and use other practice strategies that will solve this ten times faster so let's take an example right let's say you're trying to learn the song apologize by one republic it sounds like this but for most beginners out there it sounds more something like this right it's very choppy and sloppy and even though they're playing all the right notes it doesn't have that smooth confident feeling to it and so at this point most beginners just repeat it over and over for weeks and weeks and weeks until it finally sounds okay but that's not really how it works instead we want to drill in this pattern using the four rhythms technique okay and here's how it works so let's just take the first four notes of the pattern all we're gonna do is we're gonna repeat these four notes four times using four different rhythms okay so step one we're gonna play these same four notes but we're gonna use rhythm number one which is long short long short it's gonna sound like this long short long short long short long short and you're going to repeat that four times then you're gonna do rhythm number two which sounds like this short long short long short long short long and you're gonna do that four times and then you move on to rhythm number three which sounds like this long short short short long short short short you're gonna repeat that four times and then you're gonna move on to the final rhythm which sounds like this short short short long short short short long and you're gonna repeat that four times and finally when you go back to playing it like normal trust me it's going to magically kind of smooth it out and it'll sound more like this and beginners always tell me they're like zach after using the rhythms technique it makes it feel like it's in my fingers and i'm absolutely begging you to try this because the before and after just feels so much better in your hands and this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to practice strategy by the way if you want the cheat sheet for these four rhythms plus the ultimate chords cheat sheet we used earlier both of those are on the bonuses page just click the link put in your name and email hit submit and you can download both of those cheat sheets here [Music] all right on to mistake number three and this is an important one and that's not using the over under technique and trust me if you're not doing this you're going to be absolutely kicking yourself for not fixing it sooner because it's so easy to fix so a lot of beginner players have what i like to call weak pinky syndrome where their first four fingers sound nice and strong and confident but their pinky feels weak and feeble and do you ever feel like this when you play now what most people do is they think they have to quote unquote strengthen their pinky by doing these you know pinky exercises right but it's actually not a strength issue and in fact there are no muscles in your pinky it's only tendons the muscles are actually in your wrist so you don't solve weak pinky syndrome by strengthening your pinky you solve it by fixing your technique let me show you so if you play piano with what's called a straight wrist meaning you have your hands on the keys and your wrist goes straight back and you keep your wrist in this position your first four fingers can solve smooth and confident but the problem is your pinky if you curve it and have it nice and strong and curved it's not going to be able to play the note so what beginners do is they compensate by flattening out their pinky right so it's easier to reach the note and they have this very weak pinky sound but it's a very easy fix all you have to do is whenever you're playing toward your pinky on the piano you take your wrist and you rotate it down and out okay and now look how curved our pinky is when our wrist is over here and it can play nice and strong so now instead of weak pinky that barely reaches the keys we have a a nice strong peaky because we're rotating our wrist down and out and this technique is called the over under technique or the over under wrist motion and if you practice this technique for a few days you can magically have a strong pinky whenever you play okay and it kills me because so many beginners out there spend years trying to quote unquote strengthen their pinky with these you know exercises but it's like no let's work smarter not harder and just fix your technique and this over under technique is actually just one of many motions right many small shifts in your wrist and your hand that are absolutely essential if you ever want to play smooth and confident on the keys what's really dangerous is as a beginner the longer you don't use correct technique like the over under technique and like some other ones the longer you're going to drill in bad habits that can be an absolute nightmare to correct in the future so if you're interested in really taking care of your technique once and for all and the four exercises that really shore up all of these issues i have another video called the top four exercises for piano beginners i'll put the link to that up here and in the description which brings me to the final mistake which is absolutely critical if you ever want to be a good piano player before that if you like this style of teaching where i really cut the fat on what's actually important to get you up and running on piano hit that subscribe button and hit that notification bell i'd really hate for you to miss out on a future video that could really change the whole trajectory of your piano learning all right on to mistake number four and this one's important which is not having a plan of attack on piano and a ton of beginners out there they sit down at the piano and they just randomly kind of waffle around you know instead of having a laser focused day by day week by week month by month plan of attack a workout plan right that's been proven by hundreds of students to work time and time again so here's an example of a plan of attack from mastering your technique and as you can see we have week one all the way down through week 12 and for each week we have four exercises we're learning and each week we change the key we're learning in which means we're practicing all four of these exercises over different notes on the piano and once you get done with all 12 weeks you'll have drilled in correct technique for every single possible combination of notes on piano and so what you do is you sit down in week one you practice exercise one and once you're done practicing it you put a little tally mark in the box and then you do the same thing for exercise two you practice it on day one you put another tally mark in the box and same for exercise three and exercise four and then boom this takes about 10 to 15 minutes and you're done for day one then you'd sit back down at your piano for day two you do exercise one in the key of c right and then you put your little tally mark and then exercise two and then three and then four and boom you're done with day two and you would keep doing this until you have five tally marks in the box and once you have five tally marks in the box you can actually cross that box off the list and you're done with it and you do the same thing with exercises two three and four for week one and then you continue the same thing for week two where the key and the notes get gradually harder and harder and you'd continue all the way up to week 12 and once you have all these boxes crossed off boom you're done and you'll have rock solid technique and confidence on the keys and you'll just be burning up the ivories and can you see how this is much better to have a plan to have a system that's been proven over and over again to just take care of your technique once and for all instead of you know waffling around youtube and saying you know today i'll just take this random scale and this finger exercise from this random video you kind of feel like you're spinning your wheels instead of just working smarter not harder and having a plan and so this is the plan for the technique portion of your learning and so if you're interested in learning that click this video for the top four exercises for piano beginners or if you're more just interested in learning your favorite songs from the radio in two minutes or less click this video that will teach you the step-by-step system to learn that happy practicing and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Become a Piano Superhuman

Views: 450,694

Keywords: piano, lesson, tutorial, how to play, piano lesson, lessons, tutorials, online, online piano lesson

Id: 8sDnuNnczc0

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022