The Piano Learning Strategy Adult Students MUST Know

so recently I've been working really hard on my mathematics yes this is a tutorial about playing the piano but I'm going to start off by talking about my experience with maths or math if you happen to live on the other side of the Atlantic now when I was a kid at school I wasn't very good at maths well actually I was I had the brain for it I kind of enjoyed it when I was a small child but then when I got to Secondary School maths I found it kind of boring that's a Pity because later in life every now and then I've read books about maths and I've found it really interesting now I'm in a situation where I've got kind of a brainy eight-year-old and I'm trying to help him with his homework and so I thought I'd start learning some maths again but the reason I'm doing it as well as just the fact that I'm just interested in it is that I want to experience what it's like to learn a challenging skill as an adult because I have a problem when I teach you guys about the piano about music theory whatever I'm teaching you stuff that I learned when I was between the ages of 8 and 16. I experienced learning it as a child but I'm trying to teach it to you as adults learning the piano as an adult is fundamentally different from learning the piano as a child this is something I've never really appreciated properly in the past is really something that has come out of the research from a recent book how to be a better musician where I kind of took a deep dive into the the psychology of learning but it's something that I've really come to realize kids have this a tremendous advantage of having really plastic brains they have huge neuroplasticity their brains form connections and reinforce connections really really quickly now adults are much much slower neuroplasticity slows down throughout your life but as adults we have an overwhelming advantage or several overwhelming advantages we have much more patience than children if you say to an eight-year-old learner yeah if you practice really hard then in two years time you'll be pretty good at this they're like oh what two years that's wherever you know it seems like over to the end of the week let alone in two years time but if you say that to an adult and adult will say well yeah that sounds pretty reasonable two years sounds like a reasonable time frame for making good progress and committing to something as adults we we have much more experience of the process of learning we have learned how to learn we're familiar with our own learning styles we sometimes tend to um overthink things and over intellectualize things we'll talk about that problem in in a minute or two but we are much better at taking a strategic view of learning and we have a big problem in the piano teaching world because we when we teach adults tend to use the same approach that we use with children because the people who design the courses people like me learned as kids and therefore think everyone learns a piano like they're a child now I'm partially guilty of this myself I think I've got a really successful piano course here on YouTube if you haven't seen it there's a link in the description text down below check checking out it's completely free and looking back at it now on I kind of started shooting that kind of five years ago it's been really popular I know a lot of people have got through it but I'm pretty sure that more people would have got through it if I had taken a more adult focused approach I think if you're taking a course like that as an adult you can improve your chances by using this really important strategy that I'm going to talk about and you can apply it to any kind of piano learning and it's just about using more reinforcement than you think you need okay so I talked to a lot of people who go through my piano course here on YouTube My beginners course and something that I noticed time after time is people like tend to whiz through the first few lessons and then they get to lesson seven or eight or nine typically it's less than nine that seems to be the kind of the break point and they're like oh oh no everything suddenly has fallen apart everything's really difficult but why is it why is this their sudden leap in difficulty suddenly been difficulty at lesson nine what has happened is that people have skipped through the first few lessons thinking they're really easy because they can understand them at a mental level but gradually the amount of stuff they're trying to remember in their conscious mind has built up to such a point that it's not sustainable but by lesson nine like their heads going pop and they can't do it anymore okay if though the people who tend to succeed the people who tend not to run into problems by lesson nine are those that are really thorough about the early lessons and do reinforcement practice and learn it beyond the point at which they feel they need to grasp it okay and often when people get to lesson line and say look I'm stuck I say go back and work hard on reinforcing your knowledge from the early lessons Okay so a big thing a big favor you can do yourself if you're an adult learner is to reinforce what you're learning much harder than you think you need to let's talk about some strategies for doing that the first reinforcement strategy I would use and to kind of see if this works for you is to take two steps forward on one step back so this works really well if if you are using a step-by-step course so you might be working through a teacher Self book you might be using my YouTube piano course so you do like lesson one and lesson two and then take a look at lesson one again and then you go on to lesson three and go a step back look at lesson two again then you go on step four so you're kind of taking a step forward but then going back again to review and practice what's gone before and I will make that quite a structural process so right I've gone forward and done lessons five and six let me just check on Lesson Four again I've done six and seven let me go through lesson five again and you should find that if you use that in tandem with a couple of the other reinforcement strategies I'm going to talk about in a moment that should help you to increase and strengthen that Foundation of knowledge that you need for when things start to get a little bit trickier you can also use that strategy even if you're not following a set course so you know say you feel you've been making progress in your piano playing recently you've learned a new piece you you've learned to improvise in a new song or whatever go back and look at the stuff you were doing two weeks ago or a month ago and go through it again make sure you're happy with it make sure you're comfortable with it it's all about trying to build up firm foundations too many adults and especially intelligent adults okay this is you too many intelligent adults think because they grab some grasp them with something mentally they've got the kind of physical instinctive skills they end up trying to build the top of the skyscraper before they've got a proper Firm Foundation the other the other kind of related skill is that you can use overshoot yeah so yeah you've less you've finished this piece you finish learning this piece you finish working on Lesson Four but keep working on it when you go on to the new piece or lesson five or whatever and keep working on it still along with the lesson five stuff or the other new piece when you go on to the next new thing and that way you are kind of building in the more basic stuff that is underlying the stuff that is stretching you at the kind of The Cutting Edge of your learning so overshoot each lesson so that you're still practicing the material from lesson a while you're on lesson b or lesson C or lesson D that means you might get a snowball effect of work building up and don't feel that you have to have perfected something before you know you drop it okay so um maybe you've got lesson nine and you're still working on this thing from Lesson Four and it's helping but it's not quite perfect it's not quite really there yet you think you could maybe get it just a little bit better to be honest that's probably when diminishing returns are kicking in okay you need to use some judgment there and keep your workload manageable while at the same time continuing to work on stuff yeah don't have a mindset of um oh yeah I've done that now I can do this I've done that now I can do this keep working on the stuff that proceeds something else you can do is work really hard on drills now children hate doing drills I really really hate it but as an adult they can be strangely satisfying drills can mean scales they can mean exercises from a book they can mean exercises from things like my piano packs which you might have seen six PDF packs each with an accompanying video they've got pieces to learn they've got exercises they've got improvisation exercises they've got quizzes check them out using the link below or in the top right hand corner um working hard on drills is really going to help your physical skills and your mental skills as well anything that helps to mobilize your fingers on the keyboard is going to help so do more of those than you think you need to you can also use techniques like tallying and push past which I talked about in a video uh two or three months ago where you consciously practice beyond the point where you think you need to it's another form of reinforcement exercise yes to practice this thing I feel like I've got it know what I'm going to do is practice it another 20 times and literally take you know make a tally of the number of times you practice it I'll share the video where I talked about that later a lot of this comes down to um what psychologists call system one system two thinking okay again this is something that I talk about how to be a better musician a model of our minds and it is only a model it doesn't really describe what's going on in there and certainly don't think about it in terms of kind of left brain right brain all of that stuff a model of our mind that psychologists use is uh called dual process Theory we have system one system two System One deals with automatic stuff things we do instinctively it deals with stuff we have embedded in procedural memory so if you go downstairs and make a cup of tea and you don't even remember doing it that's because your procedural memory has done it if you play a scale of C major automatically that's because it's embedded in your procedural memory that's system one okay uh system one is also your fight or flight so if I came up behind you and went boo that would trigger system one system two is much more um reflective and reasoning and cognitive and we have the illusion that system two is always in charge because we think we're always thinking about what we're doing but system two can only do so much it's very good at reasoning based skills it's very good at um high level cognitive stuff but it tends to overestimate its own ability to do stuff what happens when you're learning a complicated physical and mental skill like the piano is it you need to embed things very deeply into your system one memory you need to make things very procedurally embedded but your system too thinks hey yeah I've got this I understand what these notes are called I understand how to find C I understand you know what the staves are on the piano got it move on to the next lesson and yeah maybe you've got it at a mental level when you and at a kind of cognitive level a conscious level when you think about it but it's not automatic and that's when the problems happen you get to lesson nine and this stuff isn't automatic so reinforcement learning really drilling that stuff into your procedural memory which happens so easily for kids is the way to succeed as an adult right now I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the needs of older learners for the channel because I notice that a lot of people who follow my YouTube channel are kind of a little bit older yes I've got a lot of people in 20 30s and 40s but we have you guys in 50s 60s 70s and Beyond as well and I'm trying to develop new materials that really suit you so I'm really interested in hearing about your experience of learning the piano especially if you're an older adult any age really I'm interested in but especially if you're a little bit older let me know down in the comments about how you have found about the particular frustrations you find the things you find easy the things you would like to see more of one thing I want to do over the next year or two is probably develop more kind of learning resources might be more books more videos whatever that are specifically directed at the needs of you guys of adult Learners a few minutes ago I mentioned tallying and push past if you want to get started on working on that stuff straight away why not check out this video which is full of specific techniques that you can use to improve your learning right now

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 28,676

Keywords:

Id: CrNNfGoz1Hc

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023