How do you teach yourself? [Bob project]

[Bob]

I've gone to college and all that.  I don't like paying high fees for a teacher that only pays some attention to me during that one hour lesson, esp when their advice isn't quite what I'm looking for and I get the impression they're just picking up my money each week whether I progress or not.

So, what things should I be working on to teach myself?

1.  Technique, staying in shape
2.  Literature
3.  Aural skills and rhythm
4.  Listening and studying the literature
5.  attending live performances


What else?....

6.  Talking to people.  Easy to do here for sure.

7.  Maybe improvising
8.  Duh!  Performing


Who else is doing this?  Do you have any advice?  I'm looking for someone seriously teaching themself and someone who's got some education in music.

I know about the pitfall of not having those pearls of wisedom from someone else, but I really think I can find the answers I need on my own better than attempting to follow a teacher.    I am my best teacher and my best student!  With a teacher it was just piece after piece and I didn't really get any better after a point.  And the teacher always seemed to be impatient that I didn't pick right up on their ideas, and when I tried to figure things out for myself, that annoyed the teacher quite a bit.  Those nagging problems in the back of my mind, the ones I can't yet express clearly, really didn't seem to please the teacher, but I need to think through this stuff to find the answers I need.  Otherwise, I'm just blindly doing what the teacher tells me.  Ironically, they say to be independent in your thinking, but they are very pleased to have unquestioned blind following. 

An example of the questions I have asked:  Why am I adding this nuance?  Is this what the composer wrote or something you (the teacher) added or interpreted?  How do I know what's correct for the style and what things I can add from myself to the music without being stylistically incorrect?  I don't know what to do, but want to be able to do this myself instead of just blindly following you the teacher.

These were concerns that couldn't be addressed in an hour.  Eventually, I got tired of following them and started figuring these things out on my own.

Add not having the technique to do some of these nuances, and then not knowing how to grow technical skills, and I had quite a knack for ticking off the teacher.  "Why I am I doing this?  How do I do that?  How do I go about knowing to do that without a teacher?"

I do think a teacher would be worthwhile for getting advice on a piece you have practiced to your utmost ability.  I just hated having someone nose in on my work when I only had a week to work on it -- "I'm not finished yet.  Stop telling what to do."  A teacher would also be worthwhile for getting good directions to work in and ideas for steering your practicing in a one-time session. 


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[quasimodo]

My post will probably not answer directly to your question ("how?")... I'm sorry but  the reasons you mentionned for the choice of self-teaching instead of having a teacher sound wrong to me.

For instance you say :

With a teacher it was just piece after piece and I didn't really get any better after a point.

Actually you were extending your repertoire time after time and THIS is "getting better"...

Maybe I misunderstood but my comprehension of your arguments is that you've had a negative experience with some teacher(s) who used to dictate you his (their) way of thinking. I understand that it uspset you. I am also allergic to these so-called teachers who are just like "Do like this and not like that because this is right and that is wrong, period." Nevertheless things should be put into perspective. If I were a teacher maybe I would act like this with some stubborn students who would spend half of the time arguing with me without making the effort to progress ...

Anyway, let's assume that your bad feelings were justified, you're wrong to generalize it to the whole population of teachers. There are a lot of them who are not obtuse persons and who would discuss positively and do their best to give an answer to your pertinent interrogations. Even concert pianists (young) go to learn things from more experienced ones in masterclasses or things like that...

This being said I'm also self teaching-myself and I'm a piano beginner (though already playing other instruments... which I learned mostly by myself  ), my reasons are quite different : at my place I just can't find a teacher who matches my schedule. I'm rather forced to self-teaching than choosing it. So answers in this thread will interest me as well  .

In the points you listed, something is missing : "Listening to yourself" (by recording). The main part of teacher's job is to listen to what the student does and make corrections when needed...

I would also add : "Setting goals" with time table. There's nothing worst than working without precise goals.

[Bob]

Part of it is that I just want to do it myself.  I have spent time during lesson discussing it with a teacher, but it doesn't get very far (for me) and tends to upset the teacher.  My teachers have said 'I'm open to all concerns and questions' but when I stop and think back, it's more of just accepting and doing what they say. 

For the piece-after-piece part,  yes it's true I'm developing my repertoire, but I wonder if I could just do this myself anyway without the teacher.  After awhile with the teacher, I wasn't really progressing much -- It was piece after piece, but I stayed on the same level.  I felt trapped.  After being away from the teacher and working on my own, I have solved major issues in my playing (many, but not all).  I don't consider getting better staying at the same level of playing.  I want to be better with each piece.  It would be something like playing one piece at 80% (whatever that means), the next at 85%, the next at 90%, etc.   as opposed to playing a lot of pieces all at 80%.  Getting higher quality takes a lot of effort though.  The process of "birthing an idea" takes time (about two years) and is very messy and painful.  Imitating the teacher fits nicely into weekly hour lessons.

It may help to know that I haven't had much luck developing technically just by playing pieces.  I've made the most progress when I focus a lot of effort on technique alone. 

No offense to anyone here.  I just want to do this myself.  I don't have all the answers, so I thought I'd post here. 



Ah, cool.... new angles I think (I'm getting confused with all this information)

*** Critiquing your own performance/listening to yourself ***

and
*** Planning your goals and practicing ***

Thank you.  I think that's along the lines of what I'm looking for.

[redhead]

I'm in a similar position.  Bac. of Music in oboe performance, 4 years classical guitar lessons, and a couple years of piano lessons as a child.  I'm coming back to piano, and trying to figure out what to do. 

Given my 15+ years of lessons across various instruments, and my individualistic streak, I didn't really want to take official lessons again.  I know, or can discover, the musical coaching : bring out this voice here, creshendo the phrase to there, ornament like this, etc.  I can create my own interpretations, etc. 

But my goals a small.  I'm only playing to please myself, and have no asperations of playing professionally anywhere.  If I wanted to play professionally, I'd probably seek some lessons.

My development plan:
1.  Build a strong technique.  I bought Sandor's On piano playing, and Sink's Freeing the caged bird (freeingthecagedbird.com).  Also Fink's book and video. 
2.  From oboe, most of my technical growth came from etudes.   On piano that translates to bach 2/3 part inventions, bach WTC, and then to chopin and scriabin etudes.  I'm also playing through the tough parts of beethoven sonatas as "etudes".
3.  Exposure to literature and recordings.   One of the main values of a teacher is exposure to the different literature out there.  But the internet/books gives us that, too.  www.arkivmusic.com has a great set of recordings.  You can also use it to browse composers to see what piano literature exists for them.  Dubal's Art of the Piano is also a good reference.  Hinson's had too much information for me.
4.  Practise method.  I don't follow religiously Bernhards 7/20 rule.  But the core ideas there are invaluable.  Making sure I can play each hand flawlessly separately, before integrating is essential.  I already knew to break a piece into very small chunks from oboe.  But learning hands separately was new to piano. 
5.  Chang's notion of parallel sets in his online book is also very useful.

[Bob]

Summary of redhead's post   (I'm just trying this idea of summarizing out here)

Areas of musical development:
- Technique
     - uses etudes
- listening/studying literature
     www.arkivmusic.com
     Dubal's Art of the Piano
     Hinson   (Yes, a "Top 40" list is a better place to start)

Books
    Sandor, On Piano Playing
    Sink, Freeing the Caged Bird
    Fink
    Chang

Methods for practicing literature
    7/20
    Hands separate, hands together
    Parallel sets   



Redhead, what is Chang's 'parallel sets' method?

[redhead]

https://www.sinerj.org/~loyer/PianoBook/piano-practice-a4-10pt.pdf

As one location of Chang's book.

Section 1.2.11 discusses Parallel Sets. 

Also, become proficient with the search function on this and pianoworld's forums.  There is a great deal of wisdom over the years in the posts.  I've spent hours browsing for possible solutions to issues I have.  I figure I have a virtual piano teacher in these forums.

[bernhard]

Have a look here for a perhaps unexpected twist to the answer to this question.

https://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,5975.msg59523.html#msg59523

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

I've gone to college and all that.  I don't like paying high fees for a teacher that only pays some attention to me during that one hour lesson, esp when their advice isn't quite what I'm looking for and I get the impression they're just picking up my money each week whether I progress or not.

So, what things should I be working on to teach myself?

1.  Technique, staying in shape
2.  Literature
3.  Aural skills and rhythm
4.  Listening and studying the literature
5.  attending live performances


What else?....

6.  Talking to people.  Easy to do here for sure.

7.  Maybe improvising
8.  Duh!  Performing


Who else is doing this?  Do you have any advice?  I'm looking for someone seriously teaching themself and someone who's got some education in music.

I know about the pitfall of not having those pearls of wisedom from someone else, but I really think I can find the answers I need on my own better than attempting to follow a teacher.    I am my best teacher and my best student!  With a teacher it was just piece after piece and I didn't really get any better after a point.  And the teacher always seemed to be impatient that I didn't pick right up on their ideas, and when I tried to figure things out for myself, that annoyed the teacher quite a bit.  Those nagging problems in the back of my mind, the ones I can't yet express clearly, really didn't seem to please the teacher, but I need to think through this stuff to find the answers I need.  Otherwise, I'm just blindly doing what the teacher tells me.  Ironically, they say to be independent in your thinking, but they are very pleased to have unquestioned blind following. 

An example of the questions I have asked:  Why am I adding this nuance?  Is this what the composer wrote or something you (the teacher) added or interpreted?  How do I know what's correct for the style and what things I can add from myself to the music without being stylistically incorrect?  I don't know what to do, but want to be able to do this myself instead of just blindly following you the teacher.

These were concerns that couldn't be addressed in an hour.  Eventually, I got tired of following them and started figuring these things out on my own.

Add not having the technique to do some of these nuances, and then not knowing how to grow technical skills, and I had quite a knack for ticking off the teacher.  "Why I am I doing this?  How do I do that?  How do I go about knowing to do that without a teacher?"

I do think a teacher would be worthwhile for getting advice on a piece you have practiced to your utmost ability.  I just hated having someone nose in on my work when I only had a week to work on it -- "I'm not finished yet.  Stop telling what to do."  A teacher would also be worthwhile for getting good directions to work in and ideas for steering your practicing in a one-time session. 


mirrored at:
https://www.pianoworld.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/topic/2/6630.html

A teacher teaches, a student learns.

So you cannot teach yourself. But you can certainly learn by yourself. In fact only you can do that – and you should! – after all, no one can learn for you.

You may have a very distorted conception of the role of a teacher. The best way to fix that is to get a few students and teach them. This can be quite an eye-opener. Once you are teaching, you are a teacher, and therefore you can consider teaching yourself. Having had some experience with some students, may help you to understand yourself as a student and see the areas you could improve as a student. You may discover that many things that annoy you in your students are attitudes you yourself have. Trying to become a model student yourself (that is following the advice you are giving to your own students) may have dramatic consequences. It may also give you new vistas about this whole problem, so that you can come out of the corner you seemingly painted yourself in.

I've gone to college and all that.  I don't like paying high fees for a teacher that only pays some attention to me during that one hour lesson, esp when their advice isn't quite what I'm looking for and I get the impression they're just picking up my money each week whether I progress or not.

This reminds me the story of the city guy who got lost in the countryside. He saw a farmer walking by, stopped the car and asked him:

“Could you tell me which way the motorway is?”

The farmer scratched his chin, looked this way and that and said:

“I am afraid I don’t know”.

The city guy showed him a map.

“Look here, are we near this town, or perhaps this one?”

Again the farmer looked at the map without nay signs of recognition and said:

“ I am really sorry, but I don’t know.”

“Well could you at least point me in the general direction to [big city name]?”

The farmer smiled in embarrassment and said:

“Er… I don’t know…”

“You don’t know much, do you?” said the guy in exasperation.

“Maybe not, but I am not lost…”

If you procure the services of a teacher, you have to trust that his advice is relevant. As a student it is not your role to question the advice of a teacher. Your role is to apply his/her advice to the best of your capacity and see what happens. The role of a teacher is not to debate and discuss with his/her students, but to instruct them in what s/he perceives as the problems that need to be solved. Do not be fooled: if a (good) teacher ever engages in debate with his students is simply because the debate is a tool for instruction. Real debate can only happen between equals. Between unequals you have instruction.

I am of course assuming a good teacher. How do you know a good from a bad teacher? Not by intellectual argument and by imagining where his/her advice is going to take you, but by actually following their advice and seeing if it works. Even if it does not work, you should still give the teacher the benefit of the doubt and before dismissing his/her advice as useless, you should enquire further and make sure that you are actually following their instruction to the letter, and not following what you thought were his/her instructions.

As for a teacher “picking up your money”, you must go back to my first suggestion and teach a few students yourself. It will change your perspective dramatically. No one values what they do not pay for. It is that simple. And most of times, the payment is not at all in terms of money. Do you know why people keep insisting that Hanon is good? Because they paid dearly for it in the form of a couple of hours daily for who knows how many years. No way they are going to cut their losses and let such a huge investment go.

A teacher does not simply “pick your money”. S/he gives you the most valuable commodity there is in this Earth: His/her time. Bill Gates, the day he is in his death bed will not be able to buy a single extra second of life with all his billions. And if you think that the time a (good) teacher spends with you ends when the lesson end, think again. There is a lot of work to be done on your behalf after you leave. I estimate that it takes me 4 hours for each hour I actually teach my students. Again, get a few students, and truly try to teach them to the very best of your ability. Here is what you will find out: There is really not enough money to pay you. Hence teachers do it because they love it, and the money they ask from you is truly the bare minimum for their survival, so that they do not need to get another job – and in this way they will have the time to teach you the piano.

So summing it up, my main suggestion to you at this point is to get a few students (don’t do it for free, though, since dealing with student’s reluctance to depart form money is an important part of what I am trying to show you through this experience). You will find out that:

1.   You will learn far more than your students.
2.   You will truly respect the work of a teacher and realise how unappreciated a teacher’s efforts truly are.

Once you have gathered some experience in this area you will be much better equipped to decide if you want a teacher after all, or if you are better off learning by yourself (and not teaching yourself). I hear Chrsitmascarol is sending a whole load of nice students you way!

It is of course very possible that you had the bad luck of having a number of bad teachers. But personally I do not believe in bad luck. I believe that somehow we attract our teachers, and once we become different students we attract different teachers. So learn from a specific teacher everything you can learn from him, without concerning yourself about what you are not learning. Once you have exhausted that teacher capacity’s for teaching, a new, better one will appear.

Does this help? I hope so.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[galonia]

Bernhard, as always you are so right.

One of my teachers decided he wanted to rest on Saturdays, so when I was 18, he asked me to teach on his behalf on Saturdays in his studio.  I agreed, and he proceeded to move his "worst" students into the Saturday timeslots.  I was lucky enough to understand, even at 18, that you best learn to teach by teaching the most difficult students, so I didn't mind, and boy did I learn a lot!

But what I wanted to say is, yes, it definitely made me a better student.  Now I know that all those excuses for why I haven't practised, or pretending that I practised more than I did, or thinking I knew what was best, etc... these must have been total joke to my own teacher - I mean, these kids will come and tell me their excuses, and I'd be saying, "I'm sorry, that doesn't wash, I've used exactly the same trick on my teacher so I know what you're up to."

I stopped teaching after a couple of years, but it was a valuable time.  I'm sure I learn better now because of it.

[Bob]

I am teaching now.

The teachers I have had I am sure did not spend much time worrying about me outside my lesson.  I would guess they didn't spend any time on me outside my lesson. 

And I'm doing the same thing now.  I don't spend much time on my students outside of their lessons.  I want to and I do when I get more time, but usually I'm too tired.  I hate it, but I don't see a way out.

I think I might have a few oddball hangups that are just me.  Things that don't get fixed the traditional way -- like not being able to develop much technique from playing piece.  If that's true, then this hurdles prevents me from making progress.  If the teacher can't help me fix it, I just stay at the same level of development and whatever the teacher is doing doesn't help either.


I don't what to think about what Bernhard wrote.  It makes more sense the more I think about it. 

I think that I pay the teacher and I should walk out of the lesson with something more or at least on track to improve.  I pay them, I get a new skill or a new idea of just motivation.  Some teachers are good at motivating people.   I remember playing pieces mainly.  The teacher would give me pointers on fingerings, and basically be giving me their interpretation of the music.  I don't really consider that I ever finished any of the pieces.  A lot of it seemed like I learned only the notes and rhythms and the piece usually required me to play a bit faster than I could.  So I would push the tempo, hurt my hands, sound worse at the next lesson, and spend a lot of time cleaning up things from the times I pushed things.  This resulted in a little more technique, but I never finished the piece.  I just ran out of time.  I finished with a little more technique than when I started.  There were other things -- I obviously wasn't able to play certain parts because I lacked the technique.  The teachers I had never seemed to focus on that.  I would be thinking that I couldn't play the notes fast enough in one part and the teacher would be telling me to add this delicately shaped crescendo -- I can't get the notes in time though!  There were other things like voicing and balance I still haven't mastered, but the teachers never mentioned it.  Or they would point out things I needed to work on, but not tell me how to get there.  Add a crescendo?  How to I do that?  Bring out that one voice?  How do I do that?  For something like voicing, I found it productive to work on a few chords and play around with trying to bring out different notes.  I know that I made progress in being able to voice things in general, but that effort didn't come across during lessons.  Experiementing with different ways to voice a chord didn't help me play the pieces I was working on during lessons.

[quasimodo]

What's the role of a teacher?

Is it to teach us how to play the piano? I don't think so, anyone of us can teach that: once you've been told that when you depress a key, there will be a sound, called a note, more or less loud depending on the force you put in it ; once that you know the name of the notes for each key and their correspondence on a score, you know how to play a piano, we may just add how to sit, what is the best position of hands, wrist, arms, what's the role of each pedal, and so on.

Now that we know how to play the piano in general, we might want to learn how to play music on the piano, then. So is this the role of the teacher? Again, I don't think so : anybody of us can teach this : "Take the score, put it on the designed place in front of you, read it and play what you read". That's it. That's all the teaching that can be done on this topic. But yet, we can't play music, though we've been taught how to do it. Why? Because we need to have our body trained to the process of playing, we need "PRACTICE".

Is the role of the teacher to practice for us? Obviously, no. We are the ones who need practice, not the teacher. What a teacher can do is give us strategies for practicing, and check out if we follow them. The teacher will also give us assignments and check out if the goals have been reached. If they are not, then the teacher will try to find out the reasons (most of the time the reason will be that we didn't follow the instructions…).

So now we can say more or less what the teacher’s role is: give us a methodology for learning and practicing and make sure that we understood and apply them properly. The teacher’s role is not to teach us how to play the piano, it’s to teach us how to learn playing the piano. But as Bernhard says, the learning, we must do it by ourselves, definitely.

If I go to the most reputed teacher of a great conservatoire and tell him, “I can play a Scale of C ascending and descending at a tempo of 60, so I want you to teach me how to play Rachmaninoff’s Sonata N°2 by next month, otherwise the woman I love won’t marry me.”, the teacher will tell me that he can’t do that. So he’s not able to help me to reach my goal. Does this mean he’s a bad teacher? No, of course, it just means that the goal is unattainable. And actually, setting the goals is not my part, it’s the teacher’s.

What I mean, Bob, is that I think you have a wrong idea of what a teacher can give you. Actually a teacher can’t give that much, if we consider it in a quantitative way. But the point is not there. The point is that teachers, if we use their tuition properly, can give us something inestimable, which is self-awareness: discovering what we are capable of and what are our current limitations, and then maybe suggest solutions to go further, but at a certain point, the teacher won’t even need to make the suggestion, because we have already learned how to find it by ourselves.

So, in my opinion, the technical issues you describe are due to this wrong understanding of the teacher’s role. Actually, no teacher can give you a universal and instantaneous solution to a specific technical flaw, except in rare cases where the flaw is due to a very obvious factor like wrong posture or something like that. Technical problems in instrument playing often take time to be fixed and are fixed progressively by little steps but not in a direct process. To me it sounds like, as a student, you were expecting something that doesn’t exist.