Learning to Play the Piano is Easier than You Think,

and YOU Can Learn to Play

To begin, I’d like to give you a little background about myself. Growing up, we had a piano in the house. I had been curious enough to tinker around on the keys, but I never was too serious about it as a child. My mom put me into piano lessons at a young age (around 5) but I asked her if I could stop after just a few lessons, and she let me. <I didn’t get any further than playing Mary Had a Little Lamb; so, in retrospect, those lessons were more or less irrelevant. I eventually learned a few little ditties to play such as chopsticks, a very, very basic version of the Pink Panther theme, and that little tune you play with your knuckles on the black keys. Again, none of these were serious endeavors. But there was a deep seeded curiosity beneath it all to learn to play that never really went away. And as I got older, my curiosity with the piano grew.

At this point, if you’re reading this blog, I would venture a guess that you too have the same underlying desire to learn how to play. I’m here to tell you that you can, and that you already have at your disposal all the information you need in order to be able to play.

Well, eventually my curiosity got the best of me, and I finally decided I was going to actually learn to play the piano – not just tinker around on it. And so I began a journey in my mid-teens to learn, and I cannot tell you how much joy that decision continues to bring me each and every day. I am largely self-taught, and I played on my own for nearly 6 years before I realized formal lessons would be a good idea. But now, in the age of the Internet, learning to play an instrument on your own has never been easier, and it is completely feasible to teach yourself how to play to a relatively high level of comprehension without enrolling in any music lessons. A teacher will always be a good idea, and we offer lessons here at the Piano Emporium, but there are so many different places to go now for tips on everything from technique, to theory, to improving reading skills, to understanding rhythms better that just simply did not exist outside of a lesson a mere 15-20 years ago. And it now can all be reached from your pocket or your desktop. You can essentially find all the educational material to learn today for FREE, if you’re willing to search for it.

Like any skill worth developing, playing piano does take time. That is one obstacle to overcome – finding the time to play. But, the next time you sit down to waste away in front of the TV, ask yourself, what am I really going to take away from this? Or next time you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through your Facebook feed, pay attention to how much time you’re giving up that you could have spent doing something a bit more productive. I know we all need to decompress, especially at the end of the day – I get that. But if you could find just a half hour a day to spend in front of the keys, over the course of a few months, YOU could learn to play the piano. You could even make decent progress by just dedicating twenty minutes a day (as long as those twenty minutes were focused). Twenty minutes. That’s not even the length of a TV show. Just like anything else, the more time you spend, the faster you will progress and the better you will get. But you could easily add playing the piano into your life without making any big sacrifice, and end up with an incredibly rewarding skill to show for it.

If you’ve always wanted to learn and you don’t currently have an instrument in your house, now would also be a GREAT time to get either a keyboard, digital, hybrid, or acoustic piano, as nearly all our inventory is marked down significantly through Christmas. So, my recommendation to you is, if you have that same deep-seeded curiosity to know how to play, don’t run from it because you will regret it later in life. Trust me, I’ve seen that same wave of regret wash over countless faces in conversation when the topic of playing the piano comes up. Do your [near]future self a favor and learn to play today!

 

(Also, here is a link to the International Music Score Library Project website – http://www.imslp.org/ – that has a FREE copy of literally any piece of music within the public domain, a great resource for FREE sheet music)