Why most piano players fail | Sven Haefliger | TEDxFHKufstein

[Music] [Music] thank you have you ever thought about starting to play the piano as an adult then guess what you're not the only one whenever i meet new people and you start a conversation i realize that almost everybody would love to play the piano it seems like it's on everyone's bucket list some of them tell me i would just wait until i get retired but then i will start and some of them took lessons in their childhood but almost all of them quit in their teenage years and then i regret it they're still attached to the sound of the piano and they would like to start playing again but they know it would have to be in a somehow different way when i was a kid the first instrument i learned was the guitar i immediately fell in love with this instrument for me practicing was fun and i was very passionate about it it didn't take long until i wanted to share my passion with others so i started teaching at about age 14. some years later i discovered the piano i was around 20 years old and i was surprised by the fact that it the few technical abilities i was already able to play something meaningful standing here now i have about 25 years 25 years of teaching experience mostly with adults before i fully went online or digital with my teaching i often gave one-on-one teaser lessons when people joined me for the first time i always asked one simple question what are you looking for and my potential students always reacted by giving me a surprising look and said well you're the piano teacher so teach me how to play but my main motive for asking was to find out what they're really yearning for then there were always three answers i want to enjoy my life playing the piano has to be fun second i want to have a relaxing experience i just want to sit there after a stressful day and have a good time third i want to regain some of the creativity that is lacking in my life so in conclusion they were all looking for a space where they could encounter these three points they just mentioned that's what they really wanted then there were also people who are already playing but they were somehow stuck in the learning process i asked them to play something and some of them played so well that i thought holy cow what in the world can i teach them until i asked one simple question please play a variation of what you just played then they were stunned it wasn't possible and they would often tell me exactly the same story i'm puzzled i can play but i also can't i just feel like i'm pressing some keys on a keyboard instead of making real music and i only know a certain amount of pieces and for this i need sheet music in front of me or i'll learn them by hard and whenever i'm done practicing all my pieces i should start all over again with the first one because i already forgot it this is definitely not what i'm looking for i would like to be able to play much more freely and express my feelings hearing this from all these people made me realize the way i wanted to teach piano was much more than just showing them where to press which keys making music should enrich their lives on a much deeper level the big problem is that expectations are often so different from reality i realized that these goals that i just mentioned before and traditional given methods simply don't fit there is no creativity involved and there's always a clear right or wrong and no freedom to move away from that and they can't express the feelings i always wondered how we got here so did a lot of research at this time i got a degree in organization management and what i learned there had nothing to do with music at all we learned how to manage big huge complex projects we divided complex things into manageable pieces worked on them and put them together again [Music] i thought that's interesting this led me to the idea that this must also be possible for teaching music what i found out during my research there are basically two approaches to teaching piano the first one is with sheet music which is a very strict way of learning and the second one is a quick fix tutorial a quick fix tutorial to learn something as fast as possible as you can imagine youtube is full of these tutorials but neither of these two really suit the need for an adult learner because on both systems the context is missing context is the magic word it seemed to me there's no actual framework out there for teaching piano so the question is what is a framework framework is a kind of a road map that gives us direction all of us are used to having frameworks in our daily lives a framework is always a structure with some freedom in it let me give you an example all of us own a smartphone your installed operating system your installed operating system on your smartphone is always given there's a structure you can change but the way we are using our smartphones varies from person to person it depends on the individual's needs so i wanted to create a framework with exactly the same functionalities structure and creativity and my requirements for this one were it should be easy for everyone to understand second it should be possible to adjust it on every skill level well but these two things contradict each other so there was a lot of thinking going on and some more thinking and some more and finally i came along with this holistic method in one simple graphic in this graphic all learning processes on the piano could be visualized it combines structure and creativity equally let's have a closer look to this graphic you see these three circles in the middle they represent the dna of music it's always harmony melody and written no matter what style of music you like and the great thing about the piano is we can easily combine these three elements we don't need another instrument for it to sound great so let me show you on the piano and i'm talking about harmony i'm talking about two notes or more simultaneously they could be blaming the left hand with the right hand or with both hands it doesn't matter [Music] maybe i've heard the expression chords that's pretty much the same there are many chords out there let me sound like this [Music] okay so far so good then let's move to the next element it's melody melody contains only single notes very easy [Music] and the next element rhythm brings life in these two other elements but just what i played just before the beginning was the combination of these three elements something like this [Music] okay maybe i've heard some people playing something like this [Music] and they always say the same they're telling me i sound somehow cut off i think i need to practice more but i won't do that i would practice differently and i will just show you shortly what i figured out they're basically two main issues when it comes to learn to play the piano the traditional way first we only learn with our eyes we look at something and then copy it no matter if it's cheat music it's an app or a video tutorial we always have this eye brain hands connection which really slows down the learning process number two we try to combine these three elements harmony melody rhythm simultaneously but our mind can concentrate only on one thing at the time so my solution how to start to play the piano would look like this instead of combining these three elements together we only focus on one element then we move from sense to sense we learn each little part on its own until it gets really easy as soon something gets easy it will be internalized and as soon something is internalized we don't have to think about it anymore it comes naturally let me show you in the piano the great thing about the piano is it's very easy we only have black and white keys and they have a specific order and if you only understand just a small part small part of the piano then we understand the whole keyboard because it repeats all the time so imagine first time on the piano i would recommend starting like this i just play my right hand below the two black keys five notes each note or each key has its finger very easy then of course we could name these notes that's a c d e f and g and as i told you before we can also switch these notes above so we have the same notes again you just repeat or below exactly the same then an essential part to feeding music is hearing music [Music] as soon as i start to hear these notes i have a much deeper connection to music then let's move to the next element it's harmony i just place my left hand in the same manner to these keys we have c e g played simultaneously remember harmony two or more notes simultaneously so that's a basic chord i just can move this one a little bit up and then i have another chord i have these two chords when i name them that's a c and an f now let's combine these two elements harmony and melody therefore i just play the same notes again above and i play the c chord and now when i play them some notes are in chime and some have a little bit more tension and the magic starts when i change the harmony then suddenly these notes here become another color listen to it [Music] i encourage my students to stay here for such a long time there is no academic learning here but they will learn a lot about music how it works when they only play these five notes and these two chords let's now move to the next element rhythm the most basic concept of rhythm is pulse whenever you listen to a piece of music and you start clapping or moving with this piece then you feel the pulse and most often we divide the pulse into four equal parts so we can count on four i just can clap a pause like this and i can count on it one two three four then many combine the elements harmony and written together i could play these two chords that we just learned before it'll sound like this one two three four one two three four one two three four as soon as i'm doing this correctly a calming effect will start domo sounds like an introduction to peace now let's combine the third element melody to it therefore just play on beat one one of these five notes that i just showed before one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four pretty easy now the creativity starts i play now sometimes on beat one sometimes in b2 three or four one of these five notes and sometimes i'm just making a pause now listen to this one one two three four one two [Music] [Music] so [Music] okay these things learned and practiced correctly right from the beginning that's the result of the first lesson on the piano it would sound like this so let me recap for you on this concept we have structure and creativity equally i think when you start learning to play the piano this way then you end up saying playing the piano is one of my true passions thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 482,469

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Music (performance), Passion

Id: T-cbdnP0Hyc

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019