The Mayron Cole Piano Method is now free

Although I learned (and forgot) playing guitar https://www.justinguitar.com/ is a great resource if you got the self discipline.

I believe guitar is a very accessible instrument and an electric guitar is easy to practice silently late at night, relatively cheap (Squier Stratocaster Pack etc.) and easy on the fingers compared to, for example, an acoustic guitar.

With learning 4-5 chords, you can perfectly cover lots of great songs. Learning pentatonic scale is not that hard for improvising soloing over those chords with a cheap loop pedal. All under 200-250$ and half an hour a day for, let's say, a year.

Does it have like random chords for reading practice? I'd enjoy just getting a single chord or a chord sequence and going through it as quick as possible.

> Has someone here picked a musical instrument seriously for the first time in their 20s and managed to self learn? If yes, it would be helpful if you could point to resources that were helpful to you and any daily practice schedule you followed?

Self-learning piano is, overall, a boondoggle. You want a teacher.

I started learning piano in December 2018 at the age of 27. For the first couple months I stayed on my own to build up at least some base knowledge before getting a (remote) teacher in April 2019. I mostly used a service called Flowkey (sorta like Synthesia for the web), the book Music Theory for Dummies, and a course on Udemy by Ben Westenra.

I highly recommend getting a teacher, even remote, using a site like TakeLessons.com. They'll keep you motivated, answer your questions, and set accomplishable goals.

> I have tried learning piano and I found a lot of stuff irritatingly hard to get right and got bored. Like for some reason I am not able to transition to other keys well when I am using both hands or when some finger involuntarily moves because of motion of neighboring finger.

Cumulative hours of practice are necessary to learn even a single piece, and short of Matrix-style skill uploading, there's no shortcut to putting the time in.

> Also, I seem to get finger fatigue which is surprising considering the amount of time I spend on keyboards anyway.

Not all keys are the same. :) Your fingers are getting a much different and more intense workout by playing.

Edit- Updated language since someone focused on pulling a "gotcha" on me for upvotes over the context (in this case, piano.)

For context, I started playing piano when I was a kid with a mix of classes and self-learn, tried to pick up guitar a few years ago and I'm now learning clarinet with a teacher.

With this experience, I can say that self-learning an instrument is the most inefficient way to learn it, specially if you haven't already learned another instrument before. Don't bother comparing it to self-learning programming because it's a whole different world:

- If you don't know basic music theory (notes, rhythms, basic chords, etc) you'll have a hard time understanding any method or any other resource of any kind. A teacher will usually teach you those concepts as you go along and help you understand them. You can self-learn music theory but it's not the fastest way.

- As a beginner, your ear is not trained to the instrument. If you haven't played an instrument before, your ear won't be trained at all. You will sound bad and you won't know why. Having a teacher hear you and tell you what's going wrong will help you advance faster and also train your ear so you detect those issues.

- Technique. This is one of the things that's the hardest to learn by yourself. You can read books and watch videos and still nothing beats having direct feedback from someone who knows the technique. You might struggle days by yourself for days to play some passage, then your teacher comes along and tells you how to do it in five minutes. And yeah, that teacher will probably make you do boring exercises, but let me tell you something: those exercises are necessary. I didn't do enough exercises when I learned piano, and I feel that lack of technique and agility now. On the other hand, now my clarinet teacher insists on technical exercise along with practicing pieces and those exercises are already paying off, in the sense that I can pick up pieces faster. Technique is necessary, if you don't do it at the beginning you'll hit a wall later on, you'll need to practice technique anyways and it'll be worse because you will have picked up bad habits.

- Repertoire. As a beginner in an instrument, knowing which pieces you can play is really hard. A good teacher will know pieces and will give you pieces that you like, that are up to your level and it a lot of cases they will actually help you improve with certain aspects.

If you are serious about wanting to learn an instrument (as in 'I want to dedicate time and effort to this', not necessarily being professional or anything), the best option is to get a teacher. It's more expensive, of course, but tends to be more rewarding and efficient. Even if you only take a few months of classes when you're starting, it will give you a lot more tools to continue improving than if you were doing it by yourself.

Also, there are no shortcuts. I've seen a lot of people who wanted to learn piano, and instead of starting with the basics they just took a song way above their level and tried to play it. After a year, the song still sounds bad, and they haven't actually learned anything that helps them playing another piece. Playing music is amazing, but be patient and don't be discouraged when it takes time.

This, times 100. Other commenters in this thread recommend apps like simply piano. That is bad advice. I have a tutor 30 mins per week and made my progress exponential. All the popular apps are just video games with high scores etc. No feedback on posture, fingering, tempo and lots of other stuff.

Please, please, find a tutor and be amazed about what he or she can make you accomplish.