How I Would Learn Piano If I Started Again

if i was to begin learning piano again starting today these are some of the most important things i would do over the next year the next couple of years in order to get a solid start and a good foundation to learn it's all the stuff that i know has lots of long-term benefits makes learning easier and makes you a better musician throughout the video i'll be listing loads of topics and things and in the description below i've put lots of links to other videos and resources where you can go and learn those things let me know in the comments below and share with everyone else what are some of the most helpful things that you're learning okay so the first thing is that apart from in the very very beginning when you're just getting familiar with the piano and using your fingers i would spend the largest amount of my practice time learning real music so learning songs and pieces of course all the other exercises things to do and musical knowledge to learn is going to help you improve and get the most out of playing but to put it simply i think that you can learn the most about playing music by actually doing it out of that time i think it's really beneficial to try and learn a variety of music that's going to get you using the piano in different ways and using your hands in different ways and really importantly some of that music needs to be music that you love music that you want to play that's going to inspire you and motivate you to keep playing i would learn some chord accompaniments because they immediately sound a bit more professional they help you learn about chords in a musical way and when the chords are played in more simple patterns less broken up it's easier for you to actually keep track of what chords you're playing learn about how chord progressions work and start to gain a clearer picture of how music is put together they're really good for working on your rhythm and the interaction between your hands and they're fun especially if you want to sing or make music with other people beginner classical pieces are really going to help you work on lots of other areas of technique and through that you're going to learn lots of valuable technical skills that you can apply and help you out in whatever else you want to play and there's a wide variety of techniques that you can learn so compare something like the beginner sections of fur release which has these broken chords which are flowing and spread out over a wide distance and compare that to something else like menu ng which has these more intricate interweaving parts in each hand two skills that feel very different but will both help you in lots of areas of playing piano there's also lots of simple beginner music in books and on youtube that can be really beneficial they're often shorter so you can get through a wider variety of things and different styles of music sometimes beginner pieces may not always have the most inspiring arrangements but bear in mind it is also good to learn some things even if it's not your first choice if you're going to gain something important out of learning it so you do want to try and choose material that's the right level of challenge for you for your core practice because trying to play stuff that's too out of your league it doesn't really help you learn as well and it can even put you off playing when it feels too hard it's better to build up to things but having said that as long as you are getting that more nutritious part of your musical diet in make sure that you save some time purely for fun stuff to keep you motivated keep you enjoying music where you can try out whatever you like and push your boundaries learning scales starting with some of the majors and then some of the minors is really a must so i would not think i could get away with skipping this they really are one of the backbones of music they give you a chance to practice some of your basic techniques at the beginning get your hands working together they help you learn to use your fingers properly and really importantly they teach you the shapes on the piano that you need to be able to recognize the groups of notes that we use and move in and around of to play actual music you don't have to learn them all at once in the first year or so i would focus mainly on the majors and then the minors starting from the white notes starting with c major first i've done a video that gets a bit more in depth on a helpful order to learn scales in i've done a playlist of tutorials for all the major scales i'll be doing more practical videos on scales this year and i do have some pdfs which have clear notation and graphics and finger numbers all clearly laid out for you and there's links for all that stuff below the next thing i would focus on is getting really familiar with finding and being able to wrap my fingers around all the basic chords we use and their inversion positions so starting again from scratch i would dedicate more specific practice time to really getting used to these positions that we use all the time in music when you start to recognize these familiar elements these familiar shapes in music it makes learning new songs and pieces much easier and clearer and quicker anyway when i say basic chords i really mean major and minor chords which are three note chords and they're the most common ones we use now there's other chords too but they're the most useful ones to focus on first and they can kind of act like a framework and a foundation to help you learn more chords in the future recognize new shapes and inversion positions then simply put adjust those same chords just with the notes rearranged in another order and they're just common ways that we play those chords there's videos below to help you learn and memorize all those chords and inversions in a way that's most practically useful for you there's guided practice videos to help test you and there's pdfs on those too with helpful theory stuff and big glossaries of chords theory does not have to be complicated in fact when you learn it the right way it's a way to make things clearer and simpler and in a very practical way it can really help you find and recognize new chords new scales new shapes on the piano and that's why i always teach theory from a very practical standpoint to really get the most out of it often theory is really just labeling stuff that we use a lot and when you get used to that terminology a little bit it just makes it much easier to learn new things and understand what people are talking about so in the beginning there's a few things to do like learning to name the notes half steps and whole steps and then moving on to how to build chords and build scales and numbering notes and using something called intervals then there's something that's really helpful is learning the chords that fit inside a key the chords that we can get using the notes from a scale that's really helpful for learning how songs are put together there's the terminology we use for rhythm things like eighth notes quarter notes and time signatures there's some other stuff specific to reading too and this vocabulary is also going to help you learn to pick music apart and how it works and help you write music it really does help you with so many things and again i've got videos on that stuff linked below i would keep listening to lots and lots of music music i love but try and broaden my horizons to listen to new things and when i say listen i mean really listen listen actively to the music think about what's happening in the music because as well as keeping you excited and motivated to learn really listening to music can help you absorb the language and develop musical instincts and that kind of stuff often comes out in how you play something and it's the kind of thing that you can only really get through experiencing and listening to music especially listen to recordings of something that you're learning consistency really is the key when it comes to practice and learning piano of course you have to learn how to practice each thing well but to keep that momentum going it's really important to try and get in a routine of when you sit down and play psychologically but also it's really important to keep everything that you're working on fresh and present in your mind so that eventually you can ingrain this stuff till it feels like second nature till it feels easy and that might be a section of a piece you're working on it might be working on scales it might be your sight reading whatever it is i would keep practicing often and avoid big gaps between playing and to make that easier i would keep my setup permanent because otherwise having the thought of having to get everything out is going to put you off getting started i don't teach people how to start learning to read and play at the same time on day one personally i think it's important to get some practical experience first before learning how that sheet music can give you the information of what to play instead of trying to learn two brand new quite difficult things simultaneously but having said that because learning to read beyond the basics is quite a long process to get comfortable with i would start early on i know this isn't everyone's goal but let me first quickly separate reading and sight reading and i like to treat them as different practices first i would just start learning the basics of how sheet music works how you can figure out something from the page all the rhythms and the notes and everything once you get those basics it just gives you another option for learning new material a new vocabulary to learn from not all kinds of music is best to learn from a sheet but some of it is particularly classical stuff and learning how to read sheet music gives you much easier access to it secondly then after a while i'm going to focus on sight reading and by that i mean being able to look at something and basically play it straight away so for that i'm going to use far more simple exercises we can learn our main pieces by figuring it out slowly and piecing it together from sheet music and then work on much simpler stuff that you're practicing reading and playing at the same time straight away i haven't really covered reading stuff so much on the channel yet but there will be some more videos coming up something that i feel does often get overlooked in more traditional piano education is the importance of training your ears your ears as a musician are your greatest asset and they kind of guide everything that you do as well as paying attention to your own playing really listening to what you're doing and developing a good sense of awareness for the details and the nuance it's really important early on to try and develop a connection to the sounds in music and it really does help you learn much more effectively it doesn't need to be complicated to start with i want to do some training videos on the channel but even at the beginning important things are just being able to match a pitch harm a note hum a melody practicing copying figuring out very simple melodies on the piano and really just getting used to how notes move up and down often inside a major scale or a minor scale and then further down the road we can learn to hear how different chords sound how different scales sound and learning to hear intervals hearing which note of the scale we're on as well is a little bit more advanced um but a really fun and musical way to get this stuff more naturally is to practice some simple improvisation improv as well as just experimenting trying to come up with stuff trying to write your own music is a really good way to get your ears more tuned into music okay i won't hop on about this one so much because i know most of you are here because you're learning by yourself i've learned i've had teachers but i've learned a hell of a lot by myself as well regular lessons can really help you get a structure in your learning and make you accountable i suppose to practice but they are really expensive what is another good option though is if you can find a teacher that's happy to do occasional one-off lessons not all teachers will do this but some do and even with just an occasional session you can get that feedback specific to you specific to your needs and it might identify problems that you didn't realize you were having specifically technical ones a teacher may point something out that you didn't think to ask or didn't know to look for that might be a real game changer for you as great as youtube is channels like mine well i'm always trying to cover things that i know that the vast majority of people are going to need whether they realize that they need it or not but the problem with channels like mine is that we have to cater to lots of people but if you can it's going to be really helpful to get the odd lesson that's specifically tailored for you i would do some dedicated run-throughs of whatever it is where i'm specifically focused on playing the rhythm really accurately over the years i've become more and more aware of how important the rhythm is especially with simple things actually to making it sound good i'm going to do some how to improve your rhythm videos really soon but a couple of things like obviously using a metronome i've been using this vibrating one recently which is really helpful i think it'd be helpful for beginners i know it can be tricky to start using a metronome but it's really important so i want to try and do a video on that as well soon to help you and even if you're not wanting to learn to read just learning how to read rhythm i think would be really helpful for you because it's going to help you kind of visualize how rhythm works and we use that kind of terminology whether you're reading or not so always have some run-throughs of what you're learning where you're specifically focused on nailing the rhythm i would try and get good at actually practicing learning good practice methods and be able to make the best use of my time at the piano when you're learning by yourself you have to be your own teacher and i could make a whole series of videos on this but i want to give you a few important things in this video for beginners mindful practice is really important so that when you're having a run through of something you know exactly what you're working on when you're doing it so to start with it might just be trying to memorize the notes it might be working on the fingering the next time it might be honing the rhythm or it may be a specific element of your technique you're trying to work on try and have specific goals for each run-through of exercises you're learning or pieces you're working on don't play or don't practice too fast there's often just too much going on to keep up with in the beginning stages and it doesn't help you learn anything in general it's much better and clearer to learn things slowly learn to piece it together and then speed it up so you need to go slow to give yourself that thinking time to process everything you have to do and always be aware of your technique pay attention to what you're doing what you could do differently and how that's going to help you move around and play something more efficiently technique can't really be neglected because it's what gives you the control and the freedom to actually make something sound musical i've just tried to sum those things up quite quickly there but i do talk about that stuff a lot on the channel and lastly i would try and find a really good pool of resources to help me learn if you can find some kind of structure to help you learn that's going to be helpful for a lot of people i know a lot of people use this alfred method book i'll put a link for that below i did a review of it ages ago too i know a lot of people use courses and apps and things these days now i haven't actually really investigated them enough myself so it wouldn't feel right to give a recommendation my instinct tells me that they must be useful for some people to give them a progression to work through and keep them playing but i'm not sure what the actual contents like without trying it out properly but if you've ever used one let me know below in the comments what you thought i can't imagine that any of them are all encompassing so obviously youtube is a fantastic place to learn from there's lots of really good channels i'm sure you guys already watched some of the bigger channels i'm going to put some links below to some other channels which i think are really useful but i will mention one quickly in the video which is a smaller channel like mine called pianolab which i think will be really helpful for you guys and the main focus of that channel is really technique based and how to overcome specific technical problems and play without tension speaking of tension you should watch this video next which is going to help you lift up and move around the piano with a nice relaxed wrist which is going to help you play everything much easier thanks for watching

Channel: Piano From Scratch

Views: 100,110

Keywords: how to learn piano, how to learn piano for beginners, how to learn piano fast, beginner piano lessons, beginner piano, learn piano for beginners, piano tips for beginners, piano tips

Id: EvLVqvK3Zos

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2022