The Mayron Cole Piano Method is now free

If you have a child < 5 years old, I highly recommend teaching them perfect pitch, AKA absolute pitch. In my experience it only took a few hours of note-color association in combination with some stickers on the piano keys for my child to learn absolute pitch at 2 years old, which they have retained for years.

> Which app is this ?

The teacher we picked for our kid is classically trained and pretty hardcore (both of her own kids are now college-aged very serious concert pianists). She has a masters in music as well as a masters in childhood education. She doesn't generally like the apps but she knows that they can be effective with some younger students to keep them engaged in home practice. The app she uses is called Piano Maestro, which is a more well-known brand. However, there are a quite a few well-regarded apps, and, as you'd expect, a zillion crappy apps. I suspect our chosen instructor's preference is more about the large library of more traditional pieces which Piano Maestro has licensed as well as the PM's business model which has a rev share with teachers.

As a technologist, IMHO MIDI keyboard playing instruction apps aren't a fundamentally "hard problem". I think the quality has a lot to do with UX, instructional approach and the appeal of the available library of practice songs to the learner. I'd suggest creating a "short list" of titles by reading some objective user and pro reviews on musically focused sites instead of random app store ratings. Then I'd watch YT video reviews and/or try demos/trials. The key is finding an app which seems to fit your personal style and needs for UX, content library, instructional gradient, chunking, etc. For example, Angry-Birds-esque gamification really helps my kid stay focused during the repetition necessary to clean-up timing errors while learning a challenging recital piece but that "slot machine" ding-ding-ding approach would drive me nuts. Our kid doesn't want to watch instructional video clips but I've learned a fair bit of practical music theory and digital production tips on YouTube.

> do you think virtual pianos are good enough for smartphones (iOS/android) or do you still need laptops?

"Good enough" is always tricky when it comes to things that are application dependent as well as being subjective preference. Frankly, I have very little experience with phone-based music apps because I'm a pretty serious hobbyist and regardless of the sound-quality, the screen size of phones is a non-starter for my needs. In general, I've heard that support for advanced audio timing features in Android lags iOS though it's apparently slowly improving. GarageBand being one of Steve Job's "hero" demo apps was probably an early forcing function. Obviously, recent phone CPUs from Qualcomm and Apple have enough DSP horsepower to do serious things. The issue is the depth of OS support for more "pro" use cases like routing MIDI and virtual audio channel routing between multiple apps with multiple tracks while maintaining adequate real-time responsiveness in milliseconds.

A couple years back I did spend a couple hundred dollars on serious apps for an iPad Pro (12.9 inch) such as Cubasis, some Korg virtual instruments (>$25 each), etc. The various piano sounds certainly seemed high-quality enough, performant enough and expressive enough for the purposes of learning to play keyboards. A lot of the instruments included in GarageBand are pretty impressive for just playing. Where iOS apps lag desktop software and pro plug-in libraries is in areas like simultaneous multi-tracking and depth of subtle control of individual instrument voicing.

I eventually abandoned doing music on the iPad Pro because the "good" apps aren't exactly cheap, though they do go on crazy (>60% off) sales from time to time. They also tend not to be as fully controllable at the detail-level as desktop apps/plug-ins. That said, there are certainly "iPad-only" music producers creating impressive pro-level work but my compositions can sometimes grow to hundreds of tracks, dozens of CPU cycle-sucking virtual instruments and multiple sample libraries weighed in gigabytes of size. But then again, my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software is Cubase Pro ($600) and I use several >$500 virtual instruments because I'm pretty into this (my use of early, primitive software virtual instruments on Windows started in 1996 and has expanded pretty continuously since). The increase in sophistication has been remarkable. However, I do want to note that in recent years I've seen demos of increasingly impressive capabilities on offer on iOS and desktop at sub-$100 per app/instrument prices. But... for my needs, I'm hooked on my PC workstation with multiple widescreen monitors and multiple different types of MIDI controllers (with pedals outboard MIDI faders/knobs, etc). It all depends on your preferences and where you ultimately want to go.

Bottom line, there's never been a better time to get into personal music-making. You can do far more with much less money or innate skill than ever before while the power and capabilities on offer are truly mind-blowing, dirt cheap and sometimes even free.

My 6 year old son played with SimplyPiano for several months this year, and I tried it out a bit as well. For me, SimplyPiano brings the excitement of being able to play popular music that you recognize and enjoy in a matter of weeks. The app has easy arrangements of everything from Adele to Beethoven that it takes you through as it 'teaches' you. There is also a gamification aspect that gives you more stars for hitting the right notes at the right time.

When I had piano lessons as a child, playing classical music for years became boring and uninteresting to me. I believe apps with a wide range of music help keep interest levels up. The app seems like a great way to dip your toes into playing piano without committing to finding a teacher.

Perhaps you just found an old dusty upright piano next to a dumpster, and you moved it into your apartment. Pehaps you pay a "very expensive" teacher $50 and make a "large time commitment" of 30 minutes for a single lesson. (Btw-- what's the going rate for even moving an upright these days? I'd bet it's more than $50)

The teacher asks you where you'll be practicing, and on what type of instrument. Suppose it's the old upright. As a professional responsibility, that teacher is going to find out exactly what shape that piano is in, if it's in tune, if it has a broken soundboard, etc. Based on what the teacher finds out, they will give you valuable feedback on whether it's even worth it for you to devote learning on that instrument (perhaps it's woefully out of tune[1], which you wouldn't know if you're just a beginner). As well as whether it's worth paying a piano tuner to have a look at the instrument. Tuning costs more than $50, so on that detail alone you may have gotten your money's worth.

Now imagine that instead of an old dusty upright, you have access to a grand piano practice room at a college with a well-funded music dept. You again pay your astronomical fee of $50 for the long duration of 30 full minutes. But the teacher spends the last 10 minutes of your lesson talking about dusty old broken uprights, and all the problems you'd run into if you happened to be playing on that instead of accessing the college's practice rooms.

As a beginner, that last ten minutes would clearly be a waste of your time, right?

Now extend that waste of time over, say, 1/3 of the total time you attempt to learn the piano.

That is pretty much the problem you run into with online/self-study. Either the guide gives you so much material that's irrelevant to your context that it slows your pace of learning, or-- probably worse-- it leaves out crucial details that you need to know in order to progress efficiently.

Finding a human mentor through a web of trust avoids those problems.

In fact, it gets worse over time for the online/self-study because you're entirely dependent upon your own opinion of your progress, which-- as a beginner-- is guaranteed to be flawed. This is an easy route to burn out. Perhaps you feel your progress stunted, whereas a professional could tell you that you've simply underestimated the increase of difficulty of a particular skill. Not to mention setting reasonable expectations for progress in the first place, and a hundred other considerations that a mentor can immediately discover and provide feedback for.

[1] More exponential explosion-- there are various ways in which a piano may be out of tune. A teacher can tell you whether that happens to be imperfect yet usable, or whether it renders it completely worthless as a practice instrument.

Edit: clarification

Are there any small keyboards that are good for playing? I'm afraid that taking out a 74-key device will be enough of a nuisance every time that it would discourage me from keeping on learning. How about a 40-key keyboard that's fine for fingers?