Hey, I'm playing for 4-5 years atm. and I'm having mild success with my playing (i'm 20 yo). I think there are a plenty of learning materials on internet (or on this forum), but I can tell you some "essential" tips for starters (for some1 who have never played piano):
- play classical music: Learn to love classical music. Classical music is simply put the best way to learn how to play piano. And form your post I can see you love it so thats just good for you.
- practice hands separately: The biggest mistake i did when i started was that i tried playing hands together at slow tempo and trying to ramp it up to higher speeds, which led to many mistakes. The right way to learn any piece is to play both hands separately first, and try to get them to full speed. It's a bit counterintuitive because you spend 2 times as much time practicing the same piece right? wrong: playing HS allows you to get to higher speed much more quickly then HT, resulting in more time spend playing the piece at tempo rather then just ramping it up from slower speeds HT. It also allows you to observe the music that comes from both hands, because usually when playing HT first, you kinda just focus on one hand's musical material, while neglecting the musical material of the other hand, which is shame and impromer way to produce music overall.
- analyze the piece you are about to study: before you start a new piece, listen to several performances of it, best with sheet music at hand (or youtube video with sheet music). Soon you will recoginze patterns and structures of which the piece consits. Especially the repeating parts are essential, since it shows you how much musical material you have to learn to play or memorize the whole piece, for example famous Chopin Valse in c#minor (op64 no2):
Whole piece has 194 bars, but after listening to it you can easily see (or hear), that it has three sections A (bar 1 - 34) B (bar 35 - 66) C (67 -98), some of which repeat themselves. The structure of whole piece is ABCBAB, meaning, to learn all 194 bars, you just need to learn all the sections. A (34 bars) + B (32 bars) + C (32 bars) = 98 bars, but it doesn't stop there, in the same way, you can cut individual sections into subsections, for example A can be split into sections a (bar 1 - 10) b (bar 11 - 17) a again (bar 18 - 27) and finally c (bar 29 - 34) so the A section is 9 + 7 + 7 = 23 bars long. In the same way you can find out that B section is only 10 bars long, and C has some repetition in it so its about 25 bars to learn. So to learn the whole piece, you just have to learn 23 + 10 + 25 = 63 bars, thats much less then 194 bars isn't it

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- set your goals and practice one section at a time: For this you should have two things prepared in order to practice properly: A piece to play (obviously

) and segments of the piece (as mentioned above). Lets continue explanation with chopin's valse: So lets say you have one hour of practice time, plan ahead which section to work on (your goal) during that practice session, let's say you want to work on A' a subsection. Try to play each hand at slow tempo several times through the whole section, to get idea what given section is about. After you've done that, practice 2-3 bars repeating at a time, starting at tempo at which you can play comfortably, 30% for example. Keep alter between hands each time you finish the 3 bar section (you don't have to, but make sure you give each hand enough practice), and once you feel you can play at 30% with ease with each hand, increase the tempo to 40%, and do the same thing again and again until you can play HS at 70% / 100%. After that try to play HT at very slow speed, especially if you are begginer, and repeat the same process HT. If you struggle, try the following: You can always play the first beat HT without problem, so play them and struggle yourself towards the end of the 2nd/3rd bar. Next time try to play perfectly both hands on second beat, and struggle to the end of practice segment, and so on and so forth. That's the only thing i can't describe quite well ( how i put hands together), but eventually everyone find his own way to do so, its like doing two things at once. In no time, you can play 3 bars HT. Move on to the next bars and work your way through the whole "a" section. once you have theese 3 segments completed, try to connect them, you can do so by overlaping while practicing individual segments. Doing this should take about 1 hour, so in one hour you learned about 10% of the whole piece (roughly speaking ofc

). The next day you will find you can play the a section much better. After you done this with all the sections, the piece is basically "learned", and you are holding raw diamond in the hand, which you are going to polish with practicing through the time.
- listen to yourself: during practice, listen to your playing and find spots which doesn't sound right, and practice only that spot (even if it's less then one bar) over and over again HS. It's crucial that you do this as soon as you find such spot, because if not treated well, this spot will eventually turn into mistake which is hard to get rid off.
- to your question about how much time you should spend practicing old pieces and studying new pieces, is very individual question, but for me its 1/10 ratio. You are eventually going to forget older pieces, but that's not a problem because in generall it takes 10 times less time to relearn the forgotten piece than a new one, so it's really up to you

- and about the repertoire and excercises: Play what you like and what you are thrilled about. It's much easier to learn a piece that you cherish at the moment rather then playing Hanon for one hour (except if you are thrilled by Hanon o.O ). I generally dislike Hanon, because while yes - it improves your technique, it contains little to no musical material. Bach contains both, so why torture yourself with Hanon while you can play Bach instead? So if you have a list of compositions you want to learn (or you should learn), pick the one you are most excited to play, and learn that one. It's that simple

Hope you find this answer helpfull, if you agree/disagree, tell me what you think

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