Ask HN: How to learn to play piano? (kids and adults)

Alright here's "hacks" and unfortunately there's no software or books to help you here, you simply cannot substitute the sheer number of hours needed to get to a point where you can comfortably sight read almost any music. I used to skip several Royal Conservatory of Music grades using these "hacks". But you are gonna be disappointed because it requires serious commitment, used to practice like 12 hours a day when I was a kid and eventually slowed to a point where I no longer actively play but able to pick it up and play the Rachmaninoff's Moment Musicaux from memory, this is the highest point I was able to reach, something that child prodigies master before they turn 10.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:

1) You need to get into the habit of not looking down at the keyboard. This was the very first lesson and took years. Eyes on the sheet music as much as possible. You should not have to move your fingers a lot when starting out.

2) This one will be a bit controversial but dont worry too much about form yet, just focus on hitting the right notes first. You do need to address it to avoid physical limitations when at the advanced level, I just didn't because I'm a rebel.

3) Practice reading new sheet music until you feel comfortable not looking down at your hand positions other than to check you are in the right octave and placements. You should be able to directly recognize and translate not only bars but entire paraphrases into "guesses". For a lot of people, those "guesses" are wrong but eventually I got to the point where I could sight read Chopin Waltz. This skill also translated well when I took up cello and was able to join a local orchestra within a half a year. Nobody believed me but being born to an immigrant family, I didn't have the luxury of taking things nice and slow. Basically, my mom had only limited budget so I had to somehow make the best out of each lesson and just practice the hell out of it. I did think briefly about a career as a pianist but that fizzled out.

4) Now the true hacky bit, which builds upon the previous skill that requires you to translate the notes to finger positioning without thinking. Challenge yourself to sheet music you can barely play both hands. I recommend Bach because it is missing the expressive dynamics and focused on rapid eye hand dexterity. Inventions a Deux voix or Trois voix play two and three separate melodic sequences.

4) The biggest break through and the aha! moment in rapidly mastering an instrument was to keep sight reading progressively more challenging pieces. By the time I finished the Bach Inventions, I was tired of the mechanical and depressing themes (the dude had to come up with new material or the guillotine) and naturally gravitated to Chopin.

5) Once again I applied the same routine. Finish the Chopin Waltz then the Nocturne and dabbled with Fantasia Improviso where I felt I hit a physical limit due to the horrible hand posturing habit that I developed due to focusing soley on sheet music reading.

6) At this point I could take on pretty much any challenge and boy did it take a long ass time. Just being able to play Moment Musicaux No.3 at 3/4 of Lugansky's speed (I consider to be the best interpretation....not because he's russian btw...well have a listen below) took years and years. I still can't reach his level. This is where the pros and amateur start to distance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhLDse5R8dQ

TLDR: Theres just no hack to mastering the piano. It's a lot harder than other instruments imho in some ways because you don't just play the melody like string instruments although it's easier in a sense that all notes are tuned and requires no other effort than striking a key. Not so with cello, without perfect pitch, it's tough to know if I'm in tune or if my "key" is right. When you hear amateur orchestras and professional you can tell the difference immediately because pros are so well synced along with high quality instruments.

Thank you for the advice. I tend to rush, I avoid the simple pieces and move on to more complex, "interesting" music to find myself quickly overwhelmed by the complexity.

I will try your 'hacks' approach to see what happens.

Anki won't really help here. Flashcards work for natural languages because there's a huge vocabulary that you have to learn (10k words minimum for 'simple speech'). Sheet music is written with a very small "vocabulary": 12 notes that just repeat up and down the keyboard; a few dozen common symbols for dynamics, articulation, etc; a handful of note "lengths"; and that's about it.

The hard parts are getting your fingers to actually execute what they need to do, sight reading, ear training, and--most importantly--music interpretation. Ear training is the only aspect where I could see software helping.

My advice:

1) Definitely get a teacher, even if you only see them every other week. The function of the teacher isn't to "teach" per se--you'll be doing most of your "learning" in practice anyway--but you need someone to check up on you every once in a while to catch and break bad habits that you don't know you're even forming yet.

2) The most effective practice is the kind of practice that's extremely directed, focused... and boring. Practicing scales, trills, and arpeggios. Playing one bar of music over and over slowly until it's memorized and you can play it perfectly 10x in a row, then moving to the next bar. Every once in a while you have to put everything together to practice musicality, but that's generally going to be a small fraction of your practicing hours.

3) If you actually want to learn efficiently, you have to put in a pretty solid, consistent effort, i.e. 1h every day for you, 30min every day for young kids. Doing a bit here and there is like exercising once in a while: you just spend all your time losing muscle memory and regaining it with little forward progress. It took me 11 years of half-assed practice as a kid to play ARCT (university-level) piano, but only about a year as a young adult to get my flamenco guitar up to about 70% of that level. The difference? As an adult you can sit yourself down and slog through the boring stuff in order to save yourself time in the long run.

4) Keyboard is fine, but it has to be one of those high end, full size, weighted keyboards with synthetic ivory keys, etc (roughly $1-2k). These are usually marketed as "digital pianos", not "keyboards". The cheap half-length, unweighted, plastic key keyboards with tons of knobs and sound effects (e.g. $200-400) aren't meant to be used for playing piano. Those are more meant to be MIDI controllers for triggering synths, etc.

Sort of a dumb question. I'm hearing impaired (profoundly deaf), but I enjoy music. I play guitar, albeit very badly, and I can't sing to carry a tune. Am I going to be wasting my time learning piano, or should I just do it and enjoy it even if it sounds awful to everyone else? :)

I'm mostly concerned that I won't be able to tell if I hit the wrong note or something and it just sounds awful.

y, I would recommend doing extra practice each week, maybe ask your teacher for an additional practice piece each week.

After a while you might want to try out a new teacher too, every teacher is different so you might make gains in skill using a variety of teachers over time.

Not sure that technology is the answer here.