How to learn piano in 1 month
I struggled to learn piano as a young child. While my elder brother was a music prodigy at an early age of 6, I was what teachers would call 'musically challenged' today.
Piano dropout
One day I renounced it was over, and stopped my piano lessons when I was 10 years old. I picked up cello and flute later on in high school, but they never lasted more than one year.
Over the years, I've lost the ability to read piano sheets and play the piano. I still love music. I could appreciate, recognize and listen to good music but playing piano was just... out of my league.
Those were the days I got to listen to live piano performance at home. Now that my brother has left home to work abroad, I started to miss the sound of piano. That was how I got into playing piano again.
Finding my way back
I started this project on 27 Feb 2017 as a one-month piano learning challenge. My goal was to play a complete song resembling as close as possible to the original piano cover. The challenge was a litmus test to see if it's possible to relearn piano after giving up the skills for more than ten years. If this works for me, the method might work well for anyone hoping to learn a musical instrument at any age.
Here are some potential pitfalls I'd like to share with you from my 1-month challenge. By the time you're done reading this article, you will have gained a foresight on how to leverage open-source tools, tackle each of the following pitfalls, and win half the challenge.
Pitfall 1: No supervision
It is entirely up to you to gauge your learning progress and whether you're up to par at the end of learning. You will be your own teacher.
There is, however, a downside to having that much freedom and autonomy. It can be all too easy to stray off course if there isn't any intelligent self-monitoring strategy in place. Through years of trial and error, logging in the hours without improvising the learning method, can often lead to a stall in progress.
Progressive learning has to come from both time and deliberate focus. While improvisation is widely perceived as a behavior of spontaneity, creativity and intuition - the hallmark of a virtuoso - music schools and dynamic workplace are starting to shift that paradigm. They are fostering a culture of adaptive improvisation systematically through disciplined approaches and deliberate processes, as counterintuitive as it may sound. To put it into perspective: how do we systematically measure deliberate focus?
For the 1-month piano challenge, I set the parameter as how far I could go keeping up to the speed and play without making any errors. I followed this standard religiously and saw it as the minimum bar I had to reach for each practice session. This meant resorting to a divide-and-conquer strategy.
Pitfall 2: No prior knowledge of sheet music
Since the goal was to be able to play a complete song in 1 month, I reckoned it wasn't necessary to learn musical notations given the short time frame. Thanks to Suanne Tan for her advice on taking it slow to learn sheet music.
I chose a piano cover transcribed from one of the contemporary songs from YouTube. Before conceiving of the piano challenge, I had probably listened to the same song on a loop for no less than a hundred times. The song lyrics and melody kept ringing at the back of my mind, much like the mind-numbing and infectious tune from TV commercials.
Synthesia is an interactive app that has been instrumental in the 1-month learning challenge. It serves as a new mode of open-source learning, even if one doesn't have the resources to attend piano lessons or engage a human teacher. Imagine pressing the piano keys like playing Typing Maniac on computer keyboard. "Watch notes fall and press along" as Synthesia would say.
The first Synthesia piano tutorial I chanced upon online. (Credit: LittleTranscriber)
Synthesia has an in-built scoring function that measures how many correct times a user has pressed the falling notes. By charting your progress on a scale of 0 to 100, you can keep track of your personal growth and number of trials you would require to master each song. Synthesia transforms songs from MIDI format into visual interface of falling notes, or sheet music for advanced learners.
Here's an insider tip: divide the song into digestible chunks of 1-min or 30-sec sections where you could observe a chord change or beat drop. Any sort of pattern disruption is a likely indication of a segment: verse, bridge, chorus etc. Some songs don't play by the 1-min mark rule, so it's perfectly fine to scissor the song at 0:55, 2:03 or any odd numbers.
Synthesia is originally written as a video game application and hosted as an open source project under MIT license. This is by no means a promotional ad for Synthesia, but I'd suggest piano beginners and music amateurs to try it for free.
A wide selection of piano cover tutorials is available on YouTube, created by Francesco Parrino, LittleTranscriber, The Theorist, among many other talented composers.
Piano tutorial arranged by Francesco Parrino. (Credit: Francesco Parrino)
If you're opting for alternative apps with similar interactive functionality, try: Flowkey for Android and Windows PC; Simply Piano for iPhone and iPad. No cables are required. Just place your device on the piano, the installed apps will instantly recognize the notes you play and return real-time feedback.
Pitfall 3: Fast tempo
Most pop songs have a tempo of 80-110 beats per minute (bpm). To begin, play at 0.25x, 0.50x, or 0.75x of the original tutorial speed using VLC Media Player. Tutorial speed can be fine-tuned and flexibly adjusted via VLC's playback speed button. Tempo control allows you to speed up to 4.00x or slow down to 0.25x to match your skill level.
One thing I noticed was, I tended to mess up treble and bass in the beginning. I solved this problem by playing each section separately, each time focusing on either right hand (treble) or left hand (bass). In mathematics, there is proof by reduction. Tweak this method and apply it in our case, reduction makes each practice exercise easier to follow through. For each session I only had to focus on one hand, repeat the same rhythm and perfect it.
On a side note, VLC Media Player is a free, versatile, open-source multimedia player that is compatible with different operating systems.
Pitfall 4: Wide chords
Certain parts of the song required me to move my hands fast enough to cover a wide range of notes across the piano keyboard. Fast hand movements made it extremely susceptible to commit errors. Later on I found a way to sustain the sound - use the damper pedal - for legato that otherwise couldn't be played. A short hand span is a common problem for small-handed pianists as it limits the song choices they could play.
I could comfortably play an octave, but barely reach the 9th key at all. Still I persisted and believed I'd be able to reach the 9th key one month later. On days when I was in high spirits, I'd play non-stop for 3 hours straight. On days when I didn't make much progress, I'd play short segments with intensive burst of focus. I'd play the same section over and over again until I got it right.
It does seem inconsequential to learn that tiny bit on any one day, but when you practise it continuously every day, those efforts add up.
Democratization and decentralization
On 27 March 2017, I managed to reach those piano keys on the far end. My fingers are now stretchier, agile and possibly longer...? Maybe fingers will find a way to grow longer when you have the will.
Last month, I had an unexpected opportunity to play the piano on my last day at Cambridge Science Summer Programme. We had to check-out our luggages early in the morning. Most people had already left for the airport. In the midst of a heavy rain, I took a shade at Selwyn College Bar. And there it was. The red piano sitting quietly at the corner.
Nowhere else to go in the rain. Almost no one left. What better way to spend time other than playing the piano?
This article is written to document the effectiveness of open-source tools in self-efficacy learning. Learning piano in 1 month is entirely achievable even if resources are constrained, ie. no access to formal lessons or a piano teacher. Open-source tools like Synthesia create a highly attunable, immersive, first-person narrative gamified experience where the learner takes the driver seat. Playing the piano typically involves three cognitive functions: sensory perception, motor control, and long-term memory storage derived from heightened emotions. All three cognitive functions can be streamlined in a single sitting via interactive apps.
That being said, sheet music still embeds abundant information Synthesia couldn't convey meaningfully eg. time signature, volume, dynamics. Notice how tempo and mood are encoded as andante (moderately slow) and tranquillo (quiet, tranquil) in this music score. It goes without saying that sightreading is a powerful ability that grows incrementally with practice. Once mastered, one can read beyond the lines and symbols to work with abstraction fluidly, to visualize and create vivid sounds in an unfamiliar realm.
In fact anyone reading this article can improvise, modify and adapt the process to match personal needs. This might well be a harbinger of future learning model. I suppose it won't be too long until we see traditional classroom model being flipped, archaic pedagogical practices getting revamped, and tech-based open learning gaining momentum.
As the world population continues to soar (beyond 7.5 billion), will there be sufficient earth resources to support all of us? The answer lies in democratizing information and decentralized sharing of resources.
Originally published at showdeyang.com
