The choice of whether to learn piano yourself through self-teaching methods or to work with a teacher can be a confusing one to make; especially if you’re a beginner. It’s true that it is possible to learn an instrument by teaching yourself and I have met quite a number of brilliant musicians who had no or limited tuition. Some of these musicians even found that, when they did have lessons, they felt limited by their teachers or found them boring.
There is also the expense of lessons which can lead some to self-teach or find cheaper alternatives such as learning through apps and tuition software/hardware.
It’s definitely true that there are some bad teachers out there as well as those teachers who are perfectly competent but, for whatever reason, don’t really click with certain students. Both of these situations can put some students off from piano lessons (or even the piano in general!) sometimes for life. In my view this is a tragedy.
The cost of lessons is a real one and it is true that working with a piano teacher is not cheap because good teachers charge professional rates. In this post I’m going to talk a little bit about what a piano teacher can offer you and why the expense is often justified and good value for money.
Save You Time
Being a beginner pianist is often bewildering. If you go online you will find a wealth of videos, worksheets, guides and tutorials all designed to help you learn the piano. A lot of these are very good materials but the question that a lot of beginners struggle to answer is “Where do I start?” With a piano teacher this question is immediately answered. Any good teacher will talk through your goals at the first lesson and then design a programme that will take you through a ladder of learning one rung at a time. Along the way, they may use some online resources also, but these will be carefully selected to be at the right difficulty level for you.
A lot of people are put off learning an instrument too early in the process. This is often because they have dived in at the deep end and made the learning too tricky for themselves. A teacher can help to make this experience a thing of the past.
The Process Is Progress
Top athletes aren’t constantly thinking about winning tournaments. They’re thinking about how they can train most effectively. When starting a business, entrepreneurs don’t walk around with dollar signs for irises whilst obsessing over what colour Ferrari they’re going to buy. Instead they’re focussing on carefully researching and refining their business plan whilst building relationships.
The best pianists in the world don’t get to play the Royal Albert Hall because they really wanted it to happen. The best pianists in the world practised effectively one day at a time, played at every performance opportunity that came their way and one day they woke up to find they had the gig of a lifetime scheduled that evening.
This is called the process and it’s how we get good at anything. Learning piano takes a long time if you want to be good and sometimes it can be demoralising to be totally honest. Sometimes it feels like you’re going backwards and it can even leave you feeling like you “should” have made more progress than you currently have.
A good teacher will track your progress and remind you how far you have come if you feel dismayed about your progress. They might alter your learning plan if your goals have changed or to help you fall in love with the piano again. Most importantly, given time, they will teach you to love the process of piano practise.
Making The Complicated Easy By Giving You Different Perspectives
Failure is a feature of learning anything. If you start learning an instrument you WILL make mistakes. You will NOT understand some concepts the first time round. At times, if I’m being honest, you might feel stupid.
Unfortunately these are just the raw facts of learning anything. In order to be good at something you must first of all be bad at it. Sometimes for a long time! It’s not surprising then that a lot of people struggle with this and get disheartened (I’ve especially found this to be true with my adult students).
The good news is that a piano teacher will be able to explain and show you things in a number of different ways when you inevitably struggle with something. Off the top of my head I can think of 5 different ways of explaining how to play written music notation in the correct time (time signature counting, note value counting, Kodaly syllables, word-counting, hand signals) and each one might work for 5 different students.
Accompany You
Playing a duet on the piano is super fun and a great way of developing musical skills such as rhythm, sight-reading and improvisation. At SPA we are big on getting our students (especially the young ones!) playing duets as soon as possible. As soon as you know the difference between high and low on the piano you are ready to make music with other people. This sparks so much joy for both student and teacher and can be a super motivating factor to improve behind the instrument.
Learn How and Why You Make Mistakes
Modern technology has given rise to a multitude of apps and teaching softwares that claim to teach you piano without you needing a human teacher. These are often attractive to beginners because they are usually cheaper than a real teacher and the student can learn whenever they want instead of being limited to their weekly lesson time.
Some of these apps can even tell you when you’ve made a mistake. This all sounds good right? I’d think twice.
Let’s say you have your digital piano connected to an app on your iPad that is displaying the notes for you to play and can tell if you play a wrong note. All is going well until bar 17 when you accidentally play a G instead of an F. The app tells you at the end of your play through that you played a wrong note so you go back to the beginning of the piece and tell yourself you’ll “get it this time”. You play up to bar 17 again and unfortunately you play a G instead of an F again. This process repeats a few times until you tell yourself “I can’t do this” and you get up from the piano to make a cup of tea. Practise over.
Wrong notes happen for a lot of reasons which include, but are not limited to:
– Playing repertoire that is too advanced.
– Technical deficiency
– Too little practise being done.
– Too much ineffective practise being done.
– Misreading sheet music.
– Inefficient fingering patterns
If a teacher was in the room instead of your app they might have deduced that the reason you were playing a G instead of an F wasn’t actually any of the above but it was because you were holding your breath whilst playing! This is something we see at SPA all of the time and is a result of a stress response to reading and playing music. This is something that an app would never pick up on.
This is a very long-winded way of explaining how learning through an app can only take you so far. They will never be able to provide you with the feedback that a human piano teacher can. Understanding why you made a mistake is key to learning how to avoid making that same mistake in the future. Having a more experienced musician guide you through this process can not be substituted.
Give You Recommendations
Listening to music is key to learning it. It can inspire you to practise your instrument, help develop your ear and you can even find that what you listen to finds its way in to your fingers after a while! A good teacher will have a broad understanding of lots of different genres of music so they should be able to introduce you to music that you might have never normally encountered.
I remember one of my piano teachers introduced me to the geniuses of Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau. My drum teacher showed me both the progressive metal band Animals as Leaders and the Gordon Goodwin Big Band for the first time; the former of which led to a life long appreciation not only of Animals as Leaders but also the wider genre of math rock and jangly, rhythmically complex music.
Make The Theory Relevant
I used to hate theory! It just seemed like a load of facts and knowledge that I had to insert in my head and keep it there for no reason other than to sit an exam. Indeed, when doing theory exams it can sometimes seem like the paper-based exercises have no bearing to actual music. Why do I need to worry about how quavers are beamed together when there’s the correct number of beats in a bar anyway? Why does it matter if a sharp is written as an accidental or in a key signature and why, for crying out loud, is everything in Italian?!
Theory is only half the story. Sheffield Piano Academy adheres to the rule “sound before symbol”. If music is a language then we should learn what something sounds like and how to use it before we learn what it looks like written down. This is similar to how a child would learn how to pronounce a word and use it in a sentence before learning how to write it. If you can’t apply a theoretical idea to your instrument you’re probably not going to remember what it’s about. It’s for this reason that you will always learn with our teachers why the theory you’ve learned is important.
Accountability
Here at SPA we don’t tell our students off. The reality is is that we don’t need to because they know if they have practised sufficiently or not. Having regular lessons with a teacher means that you become aware of if you’ve put in the work in between lessons or not. If you haven’t practised, you know your teacher will have noticed and that’s often motivation to put the work in!
My favourite question at the beginning of most lessons is “How has your practise been this week?” Which is usually met with either a self-satisfied smile or a face that says “non-existent”! If the answer is the latter, we deal with it and move on. No big problem. But the rest of the lesson usually reveals what needs to be done.
Conclusion
When you’re learning an instrument you are investing both money AND time. If you teach yourself you can often be spinning your wheels and not practising optimally all whilst wasting your time. That is a large time investment to see very little return when, with the help of an effective and compatible teacher, the alternative takes a little financial investment but speeds you on to achieving your goal of becoming a brilliant pianist.
In this post we’ve talked about all the possible barriers that come to learning an instrument. Put bluntly, it’s complicated and it takes a long time. Being self-taught often makes these barriers seem larger than they need to be and can lead to people with lots of musical potential to be put off learning music for life. Don’t risk becoming one of those people. Reduce the risk of quitting or wasting time with unproductive practise by working with a teacher who you get on with!