The internet is a brilliant place to learn piano.
You can self-teach yourself chords, scales, basic music theory and download any kind of sheet
music to get started playing right away. If you're just playing purely for fun, then you arguably
don't need a teacher. That being said, if you want to progress to more complicated pieces, I
highly suggest you finding a teacher or a mentor. Hi! I'm Jazer! In this video, I want to share with
you 5 common pitfalls of self-taught pianists. I will not only share with you what they are, I
want to also give you solutions to combating them. I will count them down from number 5 to
number 1, so make sure you stick until the end to find out what number 1 is. Before we get
into everything, make sure you subscribe to this channel so you stay in touch with more of
these free piano lessons and tutorials. Number 5 on the list is "Poor Technique". And within poor
technique there's a couple of things i want to talk about. The first thing is tension.
So when I see self-taught pianist play sometimes, they look like they're lifting
weights or something when they're playing. You know, sort of have this huge tension in their
forearms. And not only can you visibly see it, you can also hear it in their playing.
It's not fluent, and easy, and flowy. And I have huge empathy for this tension problem.
It's because when you're playing the piano, it's highly complex tasks. Right you have 10 fingers
that are doing different things. So it feels like there's 10 different apps that are running at the
same time. And you just have one brain to try to make sense of everything and make everything work.
Inevitably. because it's so complex and you're so focused on so many different things. you could
be doing a lot of subconscious things like just tensing your arm when you don't need to be. The
second thing within poor technique is the poor finger independence. Try and exercise with me
guys, I need your right hand first. Can you please hold down every note in the C position
- C D E F G. Like this, okay? So now I want you to be playing your thumb 8 times but keep
these other 4 pressed down so like this. And move on to the next finger but
everything is kept down. Next one. Next one. And then you can try that also
with your left hand, of course. Now how did you go with that exercise? If that
exercise felt completely difficult and undoable, it probably means you don't have as much finger
independence as you probably can have. Finger independence is really important in piano playing.
Because like I was saying before, when you're playing piano it's a highly complex task and it's
almost like having 10 different apps running. And you need each app to do its thing so that
everything can run smoothly. When you have, for example, a weak finger (for example the 4th often
is a weak finger) you know when that doesn't have enough finger independence it's going to start to
affect other fingers, too. So it's gonna affect, for example, the 5th or the 3rd when the
4th isn't working properly. Poor technique is an interesting thing to talk about because
when you do something for months and years, it becomes ingrained into your subconscious.
And it's really hard to change it later. Now wanting to get brilliant technique
on piano doesn't happen overnight. It takes years of training. I've been playing
the piano for 18 years and I'm still continuing to refine my technique every day. But here
are a few quick solutions I have for you. I have 3 things for you. First thing would be
to play with slightly curved fingers like this. Not like this. Okay slightly curved. Second thing is to lower
your wrist. So if you put the meaty part of your hand on the white keys and
you just move it out this way, that should be where your wrist is. So not
too high and not too low. Just around there. So meaty part on the white keys and just move
out. And one more thing is to stay close to the keyboard so when you're playing your music. Try
not to lift especially your thumb up okay so stay. Everything as close to the keyboard as possible,
so you have the most control. It's not easy to do but we should always try to do it. Number 4
on the list is "Poor Counting or Poor Rhythm". So when I see self-taught
pianist play, sometimes their rhythm or tempo is really unregulated. For
example, they'll play something like this... Something like that you know when it's supposed
to be... Because self-taught pianists are always playing by themselves and they don't
have feedback from a teacher or a friend, sometimes they don't realize parts that they are
playing either faster or slower. And like the thing that was saying before if you continually
practice for weeks and months in the wrong way, suddenly that becomes your subconscious behavior.
And then it's really, really hard to change after that. So, it's so important to get that counting
and that beat steady when you're practicing piano. What are some solutions to help yourself keep
in beat? Metronome practice is a clear favorite of mine and many piano teachers. Okay, you
can use a traditional one like this one. Or an electronic one or also maybe even a watch.
And this is a recent purchase I've had that I am so in love with. I'll just show you what that
is in a second. So what's a metronome? A metronome is something that helps you to keep time. So you
set a speed, so if you go all the way up there - it clicks at a very slow tempo. And all the way
down here - it clicks at a really fast tempo. So, for example, what would be good to do as
you're practicing as a self-taught pianist is to regularly practice with metronome
so you're staying completely on beat. Now recently I've had the great pleasure of
buying this Soundbrenner metronome watch. And it's been such a delight because I think
it takes the metronome practice to just a ridiculously higher level. Instead of hearing the
beat, I'm actually feeling the beat on my wrist. So I do a double tap and right now as
you can see it's... I don't know if you can hear it in the microphone as well. I can
feel a really strong vibration on my wrist. It's just wonderful. I'm actually going to do
videos just talking about this watch and why it's so helpful for pianists. So stay tuned for those.
Number 3 on the list is "Poor Sight Reading". So when we talk about sight reading and self-taught
pianists, I think a lot of self-taught pianists suffer in sight reading because they use something
called Synthesia. Now lots of piano teachers dislike Synthesia because it doesn't teach people
to read sheet music. I think Synthesia has some good points and also some bad points. The bad
thing of Synthesia is that when you become overly reliant on this visual representation
of notes coming down and pressing on them, you never really learn to read these black
dots on a page which is a shame. Because this is how 99% of the world communicates with
each other in music. Also Synthesia doesn't really teach you fingerings. So you never really
learn how to use your hand properly. But the great thing about Synthesia is that it gives you a
really quick way of learning something without needing to be great at reading sheet music. It's
really good for motivation. Right, sometimes you don't want to wait, you know, years before you can
play the pieces you want. You want to get started quickly. And from a motivational standpoint, I
think that's important because we should all play pieces that we're passionate about. You know,
we can all relate to the times in our piano lessons when, for example, if you have a teacher
that gives you lots of pieces you don't really like reading and playing. You know, you can feel
sort of low motivation as you go weekly to your lessons. You just sometimes want to play what you
really want to play. So Synthesia is really good for that giving a quick solution to help people to
play what they want to play. But as I said before, Synthesia does have its drawbacks. Okay learning
to read the sheet music is a very essential part of your piano playing journey. Sometimes I
think people who have learned on Synthesia for years are sort of like people that can speak
a language but don't know how to read and write. It feels like they can get by but they just have
this huge handicap and they can never really go past a certain level. So if you never learn
how to read sheet music, I think you will get really great at piano playing. And then you'll
hit a certain point where it's impossible to go up. And you're sort of wondering "Well, why can't
I go up?" And it's because you can't read sheet music and then when you go "Oh, so you think
I better learn some sheet music now?" But then now when you have to go from this level all the
way down and learn "Oh this is uh, this is C. Oh and this is D..." It becomes a really..
like it's hard to go from a high level down back to level zero. So it's kind of like the
person I was saying before, the person who can speak really well but doesn't know how to
read and write. And then now having to go back to level zero and learn A B C D. It can be a
hard journey. So the solution I have for you is to always read a little bit of music even if
it's just 4 bars a day. Read a bit of music every day. Number 2 on the list is "Poor Fingering".
Now I'm gonna play something twice for you. The first playing is how I see a lot of self-taught
pianist play and the second time is the better playing. I want you to see if you can spot any
differences in playing one and two playing. One is this... Playing two is this. Did you spot any differences? No,
it's a really subtle difference. But the second time of playing, I was using much smarter and more efficient fingering that
made the whole thing sound nicer and felt easier to play. In the first playing which
is what I see a lot of self pianists do is... Do you see this, this kind of... If you were to play piano for longer, you'll know
that this using your 5 to play these 3 notes is just not a smart way of using your hand. It's
much smarter to go in this turn, to do 3-2-1, that way you have enough fingers.
See that that's much easier than... So it's these little things that I think when
you compound over time and you don't get proper fingering instructions. Piano playing, it sort
of feels like you hit a cap and you can't go much further because you don't know how to use your
hands efficiently. My solution for you is to try to either buy or download scores with fingerings
and try to follow them as strictly as you can. Because fingerings are usually written by editors
who are real pianists that can actually help you to plan how to use your hand as efficiently as
possible. Okay down to our number. One thing, number one is "Poor Practicing Methods". And
this is where people practice things in a wrong way and they take ages to learn a piece
practicing efficiently. And in a correct way is a huge underlying message really. In
all the videos you see on this channel, I am very interested in almost kind of hijacking
or finding a much better way to practice so that we can all save time. When I look at students
or pianists around me, I feel like most people practice in a way that isn't optimal and
actually wastes a lot of time. I have a challenge for you. If something that would usually take you
about one hour to master, if I say to you you only have today 10 minutes to practice and I want you
to achieve the same results as if you had an hour, how would you do it? Firstly, I want to say
that's completely possible because I do this, too. I always say to my students, what can take
other people one hour to do I can probably do it in 10 minutes or less. Not because I
have more experience but because I have a better way of practicingT there are many, many
different ways to practice correctly. There are tons of ways to practice wrongly but I want
to give you one thing to think about today for practicing correctly. One of the ways to
practice correctly is definitely to practice in smaller sections and repeat that for seven
times. For example, if we were to play... If I were a beginner learning this piece, by
the time I reach you know bar 9 10 11 I've essentially already forgotten what my hands
were doing in the first couple of bars. The much better way of practice is to focus, for
example, only on the first two bars. So one... two... three... And I usually call it out myself,
too so I keep track of this. Seven times and so on, and so forth. And when you
reach the seventh time, you should feel that in that seventh time you're not actually
needing to think about it too much anymore. It sort of is happening on autopilot. And how
wonderful is that because that's the whole idea of practice. Right, the whole idea of practicing
is to practice it so that it becomes in your subconscious. And you don't have to consciously
think about it so that your conscious mind can now think about something else which is to
learn more music. So, I highly recommend this section is to practice correctly. And one way
of practicing correctly is to do it in small sections and repeat it for seven times. We have
come to the end of this video. Which of these 5 things can you relate to the most? Please
let me know in the comments below. I read all the comments that you write. Hope you have fun
practicing and I'll catch you in the next video.
