Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Self-Teaching Support Thread

I had both lessons and was self-taught. Did classical with lessons from 6-18, and learned jazz on my own.

Both have their pluses and minuses. With a good teacher, you'll develop strong technique, theory, musical skills.

But the real improvement comes with practice, just like any sport. You need to work on specific things 1000's of time so it becomes natural.

It depends on what you want to self-teach. I've tried learning guitar on my own. Didn't get too far. I can imagine I'd fail miserably if I tried to learn the violin from scratch.

For proper finger/hand technique, get a good classical. For ear training, you can work on that yourself. For jazz, learn the basics WELL and forget about all the rest until that.

If you expand on what you want to learn, people may be able to offer better advice.

Perhaps we can compile a list of resources for self-teachers.

When I have not taken lessons, I don't progress very much. I progressed the most taking a group class at our community college. That was a good setting for me.

On the other hand, I don't like weekly lessons. It's too frequent. Once a month is good for me, but I don't have a teacher close by who teaches blues/jazz.

I find the next best choice for me are online lessons, although there still isn't the motivation to practice as much.

If our community college offered pop/jazz/blues piano, I would definitely be there.

I have pressed the keys on a piano since quite early, but not until last year, at the age of 18, did I start to take the playing a bit more of a hobby than just plainless hammering. The first melody I learned with both hands was the Tetris A theme with both hands, and since then I have tried to learn themes and melodies that I feel I want to be able to reproduce myself. I enjoy listening to most genres within music, but the melodies I focus to learn is mostly ones from video games; those are some of the songs which have affected me greatly during my growth.

I believe my musical ear is quite developed and I am able to find the correct notes for melodies. However, I have sadly not tried much to learn melodies directly by ear, for no reason at all. After I had learned Tetris I read up on how to read sheets to be able to learn the songs I desired at that time. I am now able to read sheets at a very basic level; it takes a moment for me to find the correct key that the sheet tells me to play. Other learning methods that I use include random videos on the internet and a certain application called Synthesia. I have use of the ear in all of the methods I have until now tried, to hear if the key I pressed was the correct one and could be used in the melody.

I have not taken any lessons yet, and I do not plan to in the close future either. I do not know even a fifth of the terms that are commonly used within the world of piano, but I feel that I am moving forward at a pleasing pace. I do play one session on the piano atleast once if I have a piano close by, and within them I play both the melodies I have learned, and the ones I have yet to play fluently.

I do not inherit much knowledge about the theory of piano playing, and the items I use to learn melodies are questionably able to help me gain more of that knowledge. Yet, I do feel that I learn much by playing the songs, not only to play the song in question, but also how music works. I know much more about chords than I did before, I learn which keys works well with others in combinations, and how to move the hand up and down certain chords and arpeggios with more ease than before. I believe much of the playing is based on logic aswell; if it is uncomfortable doing a movement, change your posture and setting of hand to match up with the difficulty.

I am hobby pianist, performing for my relatives and friends, and for their friends and relatives. It does not require much to get to play at other pianos if you are visiting someone: "Oh, you have a piano!" "Yes. Do you play?" "Aye, I am within the learning phase right now". The music I play are not melodies that everyone knows of, mostly because of the reason I mentioned before; these are melodies from video games. My friends have a blast though since most of them have either played or seen the games which has the music, and that is the most important for me.

What I meant with all this greek was that the methods I use are not what one would use to become a perfect pianist; in ten years I might still not know what it means for a piece to be played in a certain key! I play the piano as a hobby, as said, and I will most certainly want to keep it that way. I am neither a prodigy nor incapable of playing at all, I want to take care of my ability to produce somewhat recognizable sounds on an instrument.

Most melodies I have learned is from the Zelda games, but I also play random pieces, of which "The Heart Asks Pleasure First" - Michael Nyman and "Korobeiniki" (russian folk song) are included. I am yet to be able to play the primary fluently, but I am working my way there!

Sincerely,
Viktor

I am mostly self taught but didn't break out of complete amateur status (incapable of real live performance) until I went to a good teacher for a few years. Then I realized I wasted MANY years, and wished I could have gone to this teacher 15 years ago. Oh well, there was some benefit to self taught, because I initiated it I will always have an internal desire to play, got to choose music I was interested in, and went at my own pace etc.

Anyway my take on the best thing to do is alternate- 2-3 years teacher, 2-3 years self exploration, 2-3 years different teacher, 2-3 years self exploration, 2-3 years with 3rd teacher and so on...

Learn from many different teachers as possible. Then when you are on your own, take time to explore in depth topics you would be unable to concentrate on with full weekly lessons going on.

I'm always impressed with you self-tought folks who can make progress. I finally broke down and got a teacher 2 months ago and I have learnt more in those months in the last 20 years. That's not to say everyone needs a teacher but I obviously did.

Regarding mistakes. My teacher generally finds the mistakes I haven't found since I've corrected errors I've known about on my own. So if you don't have a teacher, make sure others who you can trust to be honest do give you feedback. Record yourself. Watch yourself critically.

Force yourself to develop a harder repetoire and keep going through the problem areas.

In other words, do all the things I didn't do

Self-teaching going on 5 years and still srongly motivated and loving the journey - you know what good piano music should sound like and if what you're doing doesn't sound like that then keep working on it until it does - that's all the instruction you need - and, yes, see the Chopin quote below.

Besides, maybe it's the teachers who instill all the bad habits anyway...

I'm fully supportive of a thread like this - great idea - keep it going!

JF

I would love to have a good teacher. I'm sure the teachers here wouldn't like to be accused of being the source of bad habits.

With a teacher chances are you'll get bad habits, on your own you'll definitely get them. With a good teacher sky's the limit.

So those of us who can't get a teacher are just doomed to failure?

Actually, its the "bad" teachers who instill bad habits.

@keyboardklutz: I'm really curious about the motivation behind your self-teaching on violin. And I'm also very curious about how your experience, both as teacher yourself and as a beneficiary of good tuition, illuminates the process of teaching yourself, i.e. how this informs your choice of materials to play and learn from, and how you monitor your technique on a new instrument.

Tangleweeds, How do you like your Privia?

I'm really happy with it. The keyboard action is very comfortable for me, much better than my PX-120, which kinda needed to be pounded on. The piano sounds are better too.

I'm particularly in love with the feature that allows me to input midi files created with hands-separate parts, so I can practice one hand at a time, but hearing how each hand's part interlocks with the other hand's part (and not just with built in tunes, but with any tune I want to make a midi of). There's also a looping mechanism within this mode, for concentrating on problem measures. Very practice-friendly.

I've been working on playing some basic blues, and the built-in rhythms are lots of fun. They are editable somehow, but the instructions for this needed a better technical writer or something (I've found the instructions for other features pretty clear).

My biggest gripe with it is that the labels on the buttons are written in fine-print grey text on black plastic, which is impossible for my middle aged eyes to read without intensive peering. I'm just memorizing the locations of useful buttons.

A book which really influenced my philosophy on mistakes is _The Perfect Wrong Note_ by William Westney. What I drew from it was not to "waste" mistakes, by glossing over them by saying to myself, "Wow, that was random!" or "Dangit, I always mess up that part." I try to see each mistake as a message to be decoded.

But the art, for me, comes in slowly narrowing down where the flow of music gets disrupted. Like someone said, an issue in one hand might actually expose a weakness in the other. Sometimes it's just that my fingers need to learn to move in an unaccustomed way, but instead they try to do something familiar, and then it's just a matter of practicing the unfamiliar motion, and imprinting the sensation of doing it right. Another common pitfall for me are the bits which I am generally able to play by ear and intuition and half-grown muscle memory, but don't actually know the specific notes I'm playing, so if my concentration falters, I have nothing to fall back on. There are so many reasons for mistakes -- I'd love to see a collaborative database of all the interesting reasons we've found behind our various mistakes.

I do feel that this is the sort of area where having a teacher could be very helpful, as input from someone with experience with the sorts of mistakes learners make, and what can cause or fix them. But I am also on a fixed income, so at best I could maybe afford one lesson a month... which I suspect would still leave me mostly self-teaching.

But given that self-teaching is a necessity for me, I do find that it has many positive aspects. I get a lot of enjoyment from selecting my own material, and playing pieces that make me happy contributes hugely to my level of motivation. I have a hard time staying motivated once my inner music snob starts frothing in outrage at the vapid excuses for music which our beginner-ness has condemned us to attempt to play. My main memory of childhood piano lessons was always wondering how and why they managed to come up with such dreary music for me to learn on.

Somebody wise (I think it was ShiroKuro) once said on another thread a long time ago that "self-teaching" is a bit of a misnomer, because we self-teachers are obviously learning piano from someplace, be it working through a method series on our own, watching tutorials on YouTube, coming here, etc.

At this stage of my learning adventure, my most common and valuable source of help is this forum. If I'm having trouble with a particular piece, odds are that somebody else has played it before me and can offer suggestions for fingering etc. I learn a lot from reading various threads here and in the pianist corner and teacher's forum in terms of tips for how to handle specific technique issues.

I think that the main cause of mistakes in my playing arise from the fact that the Yamaha factory which made my Clavinova was built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, and is therefore cursed. But thanks to Hanon and a garland of garlic, I am able to muddle through.

Way to go.. great encouraging quote for addition to this thread

I'm almost 1 year on now.

ROFLOL !!!

You need a teacher !! They have got to hear that excuse, best I have heard yet !

Oh no! This is a startling development! I'm nearly done with Alfred's Book 1. I was hoping to rent out Carnegie Hall for my 60th birthday in October 2012. I figure by then, I should be through with Alfred's Book 3 and therefore, almost a "pro". I'm another person going it alone without a teacher! I hope all of those teen-age girls and their "hot cougar moms" will not be disappointed with my performance! In lieu, of not having a teacher, does everybody think that including Justin Bieber or the Jonas Brothers as an opening act, might cover any deficiency caused by a lack thereof?

Please advise!

-Craig