seeking guidance

[dr-future]

I took 3 years of piano as a kid. 30 years later, my wife took up the piano, and I totally surprised myself by learning George Winston's "Some Children See Him" by ear. (If you haven't heard the song, I highly recommend it ->

)

Now I am hooked on the piano, and see myself playing every night. What's next!? I think I could relearn sheet music with a crash course. Is it necessary for me to learn all of the theory? Or should I just find some piano music I like and buy the sheet music? Any recommendations here? Should I hire a teacher to make sure I don't develop bad habits?

[dr-future]

This place is dead, I will attempt to find other another forum.

[lostinidlewonder]

You are not asking any real specific question so any response will just be a stab in the dark:

Learn all of the theory?
Play only pieces you like and buy the sheets?
Hire a teacher to avoid bad habits?

All of these questions are answered in some way throughout this forum many times, you just have to search for it. Learning all the theory is not necessary. Playing pieces you only like will logically narrow your perspectives and you will miss out on a lot which will benefit you especially when it comes to sight reading. Hire a teacher is always a good idea, bad habits are not as scary as people make them out to be, I have never come across anyone who cannot break a bad habit when they learn a better way.

[ranjit]

Quite frankly, the issue is not with the forum but your question. Even if you asked this on another forum, you'll probably get unsatisfactory replies, at best.

What's next? Wherever you want to take it, really.
Learning notation is trivial, although achieving fluency is not.
I can't see a teachers being a bad idea if all you care about is progress, in your case, as you are a beginner without any clear aspirations. I wanted to do something unconventional and to explore my own philosophy and ideas of how to learn and play the piano, which is why I didn't get a teacher initially. If you don't have anything specific in mind and are fine with paying, a teacher is the best option. (Doing otherwise requires commitment and a lot of research on your part.)

If you want to know how to start out playing the piano, do a search here, or on YouTube, or reddit. There are a lot of people who have suggested how to learn to play the piano in the initial stages, pages worth of information which it wouldn't make sense to condense into a little post.

Do you want to play more pieces by ear? In that case, you will need to practice playing pieces of increasing complexity by ear. I would also suggest trying to transcribe sings/orchestral pieces with multiple instruments as it will also indirectly teach you (imo) about voicing, phrasing and in general how to produce a certain tone on the piano.

If you are severely limited on time (for example don't have more than an hour at a stretch to spend), I think you inevitably need a teacher to make progress. My personal experience while self-teaching: I needed to spend a lot of time immersed in thinking about how to refine my learning strategy, how to play tension-free with good technique, how to execute certain techniques or passages, how to make logical fingering choices on the fly, how to produce a certain tone on the piano, etc. This involved reading (literally) thousands of posts here, watching hundreds of videos, reading books, figuring out how to find credible information, thinking about the complex nuances of issues, far beyond simplistic ideas such as "keep your wrist level" or "shape your hands like an orange", observing and critiquing your own playing and comparing it with other recordings to tease apart areas of improvement, comparing various conflicting pieces of advice by a number of different teachers and performers and trying to arrive at the common thread which underlies those. As you can imagine, this requires days, months or years of poring over information and observing one's own internal processes+actively critiquing them. I did it because I was engrossed by it and kind of obsessed at trying to arrive at "the answer". If you're not willing to do something similar, just get a teacher imo, it'll be faster and more rewarding.

[dr-future]

Thank you for your responses! They are helpful. Someday, I hope, someone else will want to get started with the piano, and they will find this thread.

[lostinidlewonder]

Thank you for your responses! They are helpful. Someday, I hope, someone else will want to get started with the piano, and they will find this thread.

I dont think they will find much information on this thread that will help them much at all. Or are you being sarcastic?

[lettersquash]

This place is dead, I will attempt to find other another forum.

Dead? Nah, 'e's just resting.
Nice to meet you, doc. That's a nice melody - I rather like those folky tunes. If you learned that by ear and all the notes are correct, that's pretty impressive. Did you learn it from a recording?

One big lesson for me is just what you've heard here, that there's no standard one-size-fits-all answer, and everything will probably come from you gradually tuning in to how you want to play, what you want to play, why, where, for whom, etc., and then the most suitable approach will probably begin to emerge.

That, I imagine, will also be an evolving process if my experience is anything to go by. Discussing my issues here has already taught me a lot, and I'm adjusting my approach from that. There's a lot of good stuff on youtube, but you do have to take some with a pinch of salt and/or recognise that the posters also have their bias (and, I think, some are just trying to make money and giving worthless advice!).

I've been surprised just how difficult I've found it to start again (also a returner), and I have to keep figuring out why and trying something to fix it. Some of it might not be fixable. Like I also started getting back into playing guitar, and then realised that the callouses it puts on my left-hand fingers are a hindrance to playing piano, because I can't feel the keys very well! It might improve - they're a bit sore - it might not.

Enjoy.

[dr-future]

@lettersquash, thanks for the thoughtful reply. This just the sort of meta-advice I am looking for:

One big lesson for me is just what you've heard here, that there's no standard one-size-fits-all answer, and everything will probably come from you gradually tuning in to how you want to play, what you want to play, why, where, for whom, etc., and then the most suitable approach will probably begin to emerge.

I did learn the song by ear, and *most* of the notes are accurate - I need to revisit a couple of phrases. Learning that song made me think I was a concert pianist, but getting through most of Alfred's basic piano course, Volume 1, has brought my ego back down to size. That, and my dynamics are elementary compared to Winston.

I dont think they will find much information on this thread that will help them much at all. Or are you being sarcastic?

I have to admit that I was messing with you a little. I knew I shouldn't hit send, but I did anyhow. I'm sorry. I would think the replies on this thread *would* be useful to a beginner, though - especially your post.

[anacrusis]

I think finding a good teacher that you click with would be a good choice. They can, as you say, help you avoid bad habits, and are helpful for your musicianship and enjoyment of the instrument too.

Regarding the questions in your original post, what do you feel the most interested in getting into yourself?

[lettersquash]

I did learn the song by ear, and *most* of the notes are accurate - I need to revisit a couple of phrases. Learning that song made me think I was a concert pianist, but getting through most of Alfred's basic piano course, Volume 1, has brought my ego back down to size. That, and my dynamics are elementary compared to Winston.

I empathise entirely with the ego-shrinking. I've had a big dose of it in the last couple of months since I started playing again. I got frustrated that I wasn't improving as quickly as I expected, nowhere near, and sometimes it seemed like I was making no progress at all. My biggest mistake was trying to play pieces faster than I was ready for (pieces I'm reading from the page, of course). It's a revelation to slow down to the tempo my brain can process the score at, and I think it's helping.

I listened to this again - I've not come across it before - and then checked out George Winston's recording, and I have to say I would be hard pushed to tell them apart!

Edited to add: D'oh! I just realised, you posted George Winston's recording! I thought you'd posted yourself playing it. No wonder I can't tell them apart.