How to Learn to Play the Piano
Lets start with some of the vital facts of learning to play. Almost anybody can learn the piano if they want to and age is definitely not an obstacle: start at four or eighty: whatever your age it can be immensely rewarding. What is important is that you practice regularly. Like most instruments 30 minutes a day is far more important than one long session each week. Even start with five minutes a day – however what you should try to do is do is the five minutes regularly each day.
The next question people ask is can you learn successfully without a teacher? Well the answer is that you can. In fact there are things that are can be learned as easily without a teacher as with. Two examples are; how to read music, and where the notes are on the keyboard. Incidentally this often seems quite formidable to beginners but the truth is that if you can read these words you can certainly easily and quickly learn how to read music.
What teachers can provide is some order and direction in what you play. The other thing is that they can act as a pair of ears to hear what you do and correct mistakes in how you play. Fortunately there are now excellent online learning courses for the piano that can provide an excellent direction to your playing.
I was fortunate to learn the keyboard from an eminent professor. What she said was that if people recorded what they played and listened carefully to the result 95% of her work would be done. There is of course no reason that you should do just this when you learn without a teacher. The truth is that when you learn any musical instrument the real task is to learn to listen to what you are doing. Just understand that particularly in the beginning your brain will be so busy playing it will be unlikely to attend to listening as carefully as it should and thus record and listen can be a vital technique.
The next thing is that it is vital that you should enjoy what you are doing. It is very useful to learn scales but even more important that you should practice music that you gain great satisfaction from. Choose the right course and it will provide varied and progressive lessons that you enjoy playing. Serious students may spend hours playing scales and arpeggios but for you simply playing what you enjoy regularly and then progressively learning more challenging pieces is the best approach.
What if you do an online course and want to progress even further? Well the fact is that if you want to play like Lang Lang then there is no doubt that many hours of practice is the answer. In fact, most virtuosos have practiced ten to twenty thousand hours to achieve their technique. You could learn to play very well however with far less hours than this. Even increase the starting 5 minutes a day to 30 or 60 minutes and practice with focused attention and you could achieve wonderful things. That learn piano online course could be the start of great things or simply the most rewarding hobby.

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