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I am taking piano lessons for about 2.5/3 years now, and started of with basic note reading. After that start with simple pieces and now doing a new piece every 2-3 months. Without those sheets I can't do anything on the piano.

What I am experiencing is that I have to put a lot of effort in these pieces, and after not playing them a while, they are fading away and you have to relearn them (OK, it goes faster but...). If someone asks me to play something on the piano, it is mostly, the piece that I am currently learning, or the piece before that. Everything else is well... Kind of "how exactly did I play this...?". I think of it as learning a poem and be able to perform it (from memory), but not being able to read something else (newspapers, magazines, other poems), just the one you learned.
I am also aware that sight reading may take away these problem, but what are the changes of becoming a good sight reader, when started at the age of 40-50...?
More and more I get convinced that one should start very early with piano to become more or less a good piano player.
Therefore I think starting another approach, more based on chord progression playing and add an improvised melody line, would be a good idea for me. The stuff I learned: notes, measures, keeping the beat etc won't be lost of course, but I would like to get away from the paper!

Anyone thinks the same about this?

I do for sure...one of my piano-goals is to be able to play with friends, and scores would have no place there! I try to practice ear training whenever I can. My favourite way is just to throw on some easy music ( 50's rock, old country, Christmas tunes, whatever ) and try my best to play along with parts of it...sometimes I'll only manage to figure out what key its in before the song is over, but they more I practice, the easier it's becoming and the more I'm able to play along in a simple way. Not to mention, it's really fun and a great way to break the doldrums of practice at times.

Good Luck and have fun

You may want to have a look at this book:

http://www.lucinda-mackworth-young.co.uk/piano-by-ear

I went through it quickly and then put it aside for now because I'm too busy with the rest of my piano practice, but it's very well written.

I wouldn't completely leave out sight-reading though, I think it's better if you can do both.

I agree with sinophilia, both. It looks easy when Suzy says it or people do it, but I think playing by ear is even more difficult! Or both are easy, but we can't hurry it, they need time and dedication. I can't be sure but I think if there is a skill I am better at, in relation to my very low level, is Reading. So it is not age. The 8-year-old children who can read well started at...6 years old? And they have been playing easy pieces all the time.

Don't be discouraged. You are not allowed to!
I think it would be good thing to get away from the idea of "what I should be able to do" and what "I can't do", and concentrate on what you are working on and learning now, and develop an interest in that.
There are loads of classical pieces at your current level that have chord progressions and a melodic line.
There are no laws that say that you can't improvise your own melodic lines in those pieces after you have learned the original.

Well I have 2 of them, one playing 2 years the other 4 years. the oldest says: Well I see that dot, but I don't think anymore hey that's a G so I have to play a G. He just sees it and plays it, no naming, no thinking anymore... Agreed, he plays klarinet, but I think it has nothing to do with the instrument, but with age.

I have been playing for four years now and I would be similar that I can't play much without my music, and my latest piece(s) is about all I can play. However this is partly by choice as I don't play much for pleasure and no one asks me to. If you want a repertoire you have to put some work into it.

My 70 year old teacher says it never gets any easier and her 95 year old mother concurs

No one asks me either, but if i didn"t play for pleasure, what for then? I spend 1 to 2 (weekend) hours a day with music (not 2 hours only piano), so as a working person I don't see how much more I could do.

Hi Johan
Maybe I am reading into your post too much... if so, I apologize. Practice will get you much further if you do a little bit every day.. even if only 15-30 minutes. As adults, we all have trouble finding time, but you would be surprised what that little commitment on a daily basis will get you vs. long practice on the weekend.

that is 1 hour/day and 2 hours/saturday and 2 hours/sunday. Not in 1 period but spread over the evening or day.

I've realized I didn't understand you well. I can't play anything without the music either. And I mainly don't intend to... That is, I am memorizing little by little an intermediate Scarborough Fair, but both memorizing or working on very difficult pieces is what I like the least. Some people are very good at that though.

Your child said:


To really play by ear, we'd need to get to that automatic level too, and that takes time.
Something children have much more than us (at least me) is energy, and their bodies will adapt better to all these new movements, probably, but don't you think your child has been learning more in a slow gradual linear style? There are many prodigy children on YouTube, but when I check my method book pieces sometimes, I can also see children playing the pieces like me, more or less.

All this said, you know I'd love to play by ear, and I am doing my first steps to try to, but I am aware it will take a very very long time.

Why can't you read the pieces you learnt months ago? Are they very difficult?

Hmm I said "intermediate" Scarborough Fair, but it's probably some high Level 1 or 2, don't know This thing of levels is confusing... I have just always found the pieces my level very difficult.


Edit: One year ago, were you able to play the pieces you had learnt months before?

I think it's pretty common among adults to want to somehow "break free" of the tedious task of learning one (or a few) little piece at a time, perfecting it and then forgetting it to go on to the next one, and so on... Who wouldn't like to sit at the piano and play something pleasant, even if it's simple and repetitive, just like that? The problem is, each skill is different and requires a lot of practice, be it reading, memorising, performing, improvising... If you have enough time, and it looks like you do, you can definitely structure your practice to include most of these skills, or at least the 2 or 3 that interest you the most.

I think the key is to feel good about oneself on most days after you have practiced. There has to be perceptible progress. A good mix of pieces at different levels helps; some very easy, one or two that are very challenging and some in the middle. Also, half an hour to an hour every week devoted to revisiting to old pieces, the ones you liked best, the ones you can really work on to be expressive, to experiment, to see what it feels like to let yourself go and just perform. Then you'll have a few pieces you can play when you happen to sit at a random piano, or somebody asks you to play something. And of course this little repertoire will change and become more difficult, and you will definitely feel like you are moving on, in spite of the occasional plateaus.

I had been in exactly your place a few years ago.

I just got tired of the routine you describe.

I switched to playing jazz from leadsheets. But it could have been any other music form where just the melody and chords are shown. I must build my own arrangement by learning various accompaniment techniques and applying them to that piece.

This is your ticket to success with that sort of thing ....

http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/chord-play-1-sheet-music/19774625

Note: These books do not address jazz directly ... just learning to play music from chords.

Good Luck

Johan,

If you want to learn to play by ear, by all means, pursue that goal.

Nonetheless, there was something else in your initial post that caught my eye and that hasn't been discussed yet, I think:

You wrote that you finish a piece and start a new one every 2-3 months and that you can only play the current piece, and the piece before, but the older pieces are already "gone".

I think it is possible that part of your problem is, that you are only learning "difficult" pieces, and no "easier" pieces. By "difficult" I don't mean difficult in an absolute sense, but difficult in relation to your current skill.

If you need 2-3 months to complete a piece, then (unless the piece is quite long, like a full sonata or something) the piece is likely a bit of a stretch for you. Not impossible, but difficult. That by itself is of course not a bad thing, but it can be a problem if you only work on such "difficult", "(slightly) stretch" pieces. In essence this means, that you only learn 4-6 new pieces in a whole year! No wonder you find this frustrating (maybe even a bit boring?).

Now, this bit here is speculation, so disregard it if it doesn't apply to you, but I can imagine that after 2-3 months with a piece, you are absolutely ready to finally finish that piece that you have worked on for so long. It must be "coming out of our ears" by then, as we would say in Germany. I can imagine that this also may tempt you to declare a piece as finished (and move on to the next) slightly too soon, when the piece is actually only 95% finished and hasn't really fully settled into your brain. I.e. your brain has had a lot of experience with the unfinished piece in its various learning stages, but only a few days (at the end of the 2-3 month period) in its finished state. Then you leave it behind and start with the next and, after working so long on that piece, I can also imagine that you are quite tired of it and probably don't play it again so much. All of this can compound the effect that you forget a piece quickly after finishing it.

My recommendation would be to mix things up a bit, and get away from these long slogging 2-3 month pieces as your only pieces.

Actually, this is exactly what the 40 pieces challenge is about (I'm sure you've already seen it here on the forum). Now, I'm not suggesting that you need to join the challenge (although you may consider it for 2017), but I strongly suggest reading through this here:

https://elissamilne.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/where-did-the-40-piece-challenge-begin/

It explains the background behind the idea for the 40 pieces challenge, as devised by Elissa Milne, an Australian piano teacher. Her description of how her students were learning only 6-10 pieces a year (working a relatively long time on each piece) seems to apply to your situation too.

So by all means, learn to play by ear, and maybe also continue to learn the "difficult" pieces that take 2-3 months to complete, but I suggest to also consider learning some other, additional pieces in parallel that are much, much easier than your main piece, usually below your current skill, so that you can finish them in a relatively short time (no longer than 2-3 weeks per piece). Hopefully that will bring back the fun, broaden your scope and repertoire, and also improve your reading skill (to play from sheets), which in turn should allow you to more easily return to pieces that you learned a while ago and still be able to play them (relatively well).

I used to play clarinet (medical issue with blowing hard made me stop). The huge difference is that the clarinet can only produce one note at a time, but the piano can in theory give you one per finger, sometimes two. There's a lot more info to process with the piano.

I really think to know your chords (basic chord progressions) and to be able to play on the beat are the two MAIN things about free piano playing / improvisation - and you could say it bascially about any instruments.

Guess I have a little different take on this...
Playing piano by ear or by reading is the same as speaking off-the-cuff or reading aloud from a printed page. Except your fingers take the place of your breath, larynx, tongue, teeth and lips. The interplay between the eyes, your "mind's ear" and your hands is what needs to be developed. You need to get to the point where you can look at a page of music and hear it in your head as if it were words on a page. See it - hear it. This is the goal of practice. You started developing this capability with the spoken/written word as an infant. It takes years to achieve but the goal is to develop the same thing with a musical instrument. Hope this helps a bit.

It all depends on what kind of music you want to play. I can't imagine 99.999% of pianists listening to a Mozart or Beethoven sonata and playing it back note-for-note by ear. I can imagine hearing a pop tune or an old standard and playing back something close to the original (still not note-for-note) and having it sound good.

I bought a keyboard and started learning to play by ear when I turned 60, but I did take about 6 months of piano lessons when I was about 8, so I had a big jump on picking up piano playing quickly.

I'd like to tell you how HARD it was to learn to play by ear but I'd be lying if I did. You DO have to set the sheet music aside and LISTEN to music carefully, paying particular attention to when tunes like "Silent Night" (for instance) change chords and if it's moving to a I, IV, V chord next (set the complex tunes aside until you learn the basic major chord sounds).

Don't worry about rhythm patterns yet either, just get your ears hearing the next correct chord change coming up beforehand. When your ears know the sounds of the different chords and your fingers can play them, if you know how the tune goes, you won't have to memorize anything, the ears tell you what to do next. Usually takes a month to get a hand full of Christmas Carols down solid.

Good luck!