You still need to build brand new neural pathways and going through the easier practices will help with that.
I understand what you’re saying, and yes, that’s what’s a bit frustrating about how lousy my keyboard chops are. I need to train my fingers and brain to make the same connection between the keyboard and the music that my fingers and brain already have with guitar/trumpet and the music.
And that’s exactly why I posted here and asked “best method book(s)?” I know some methods/approaches are more effective for certain students than other methods/approaches.
And I’m certainly considering finding a teacher to help keep me focused and on track, fighting the voice-in-my-head which keeps telling me “you already know how to practice, you already know how to make progress!”
Are you starting with really easy pieces? If you’re trying to play pieces that are not extremely easy, that might be why you’re having difficulty. A good thing about using graded lesson books is, the music starts out easy and gets more complicated as you gain more skills. You can speed through the beginner books really quickly and then move on to more interesting music.
Actually, yes, I was keeping it real easy, playing exercises really slow, always with a metronome. But then my girlfriend gave me a bunch of her old piano sheet music books.
Some were clearly too difficult for me to sit down and start playing them, so I didn’t bother with those, but some were two-voice “easy piano” arrangements. So I started learning a few of those, starting really slowly. I made some progress, but still hit a wall a few times (difficulty shifting positions, hand independence, brain farts) and that discouraged me. After all, I can play other instruments with ease!
I think I was getting too impatient to keep working on the simple, easy exercises. So now I’m going to go back to basics. And I will stick with the progression presented in the books.
For technique, I really liked working through Bach, like the two-part inventions and We’ll-Tempered Clavier. At least for finger independence. Not so much chordal stuff there. Much more pleasant than Hanon and more musical, but Hanon is a nice warm-up exercise.
Yeah, I’m definitely not there yet. I had the Bach chorale books (one was Reimenschneider (sp.) I think?) in college, and the class piano teacher went through them with me, but I sucked. It was too much too quickly then, and it’s too much right now, too. Soon though, hopefully.
Yeah, I’m definitely jumping the gun here. That said, some of them are not all that difficult (1, 3,4,13) but you need a base before you get to them. Once you do, though, I think they’re great exercises for learning finger interdependence.
Was Czerny mentioned yet? That’s another place to explore. Opus 599 is a good one:
Czerny is more like Hanon—exercises to improve your finger strength and technique. You would use that along with something like Thompson, which has musical pieces that start easy and increase in difficulty. It might also work to get a list of piano pieces in order of difficulty. This page https://www.onlinepianocoach.com/classical-piano-sheet-music.html has some free options, but the level 1 pieces aren’t easy enough to start with.
Yeah, definitely technique exercises. Back a few decades when I was learning piano, we did the Bastien method, and that was separated into several books per level: one a piano book with basic songs, two a theory book, three a technique book, four a performance book, and five a sight reading book, and they all went with each other according to level. I enjoyed it, but I don’t really have much else to compare it with.
I believe you guys about Czerny being exercise-focused, but I guess I was thrown off by the title “Practical Method for Beginners on the Pianoforte.”
I just looked briefly at some of the first lessons, and it does seem a bit more obtuse than other method books I’ve looked at. Just one example: passages with repeated notes (same hand) using different fingers, without explanation, just made me feel… puzzled and anxious. Kind of like how math lessons used to (OK, and still do).
Repeated notes same hand, different fingers is a technique to play repeated notes evenly and/or quickly, or it can be an exercise to teach transitioning hand positions, so a note, say may end on your thumb but then you need to repeat that note and shift your hand into a more comfortable position for the next passage, and need to hit that same note with the third or fourth finger. I’m guessing it’s teaching something like that but, yeah, explanation would be good. I can’t remember Cherry very well as it was so long ago and my teacher did not stress technique exercises like Hanson or Czerny, though I used them myself as a kind of mindless dexterity building exercise.
You can learn how to play without doing these kinds of exercises. I didn’t start doing Hanon until I’d taken lessons for a few years. It’s not fun, but I played a lot better when I did Hanon regularly. I just ordered Oscar Peterson’s etudes, for jazz. There’s also a jazz Hanon, so there are some other options.
The fun part of piano practice is playing real music. When you’re getting started, you can’t play interesting music for a while, so there’s not as much of a reward, for a while. It sounds like you need to start with the very first books. I used a John Thompson book for children, and I think now there’s an adult version. You will also want other pieces to play, but they should be the same level of difficulty as what you’re working on in your lesson book. You can experiment with some harder things, but you’ll have more success if you mostly practice music that is in your skill level.
Like you said, it’s not terribly rewarding to play simple pieces and exercises, even if your fingers and brain require that you do. I think I just get impatient because I want to play at a higher level than my skills are ready to support. I need to take my time and stick to the pace of the method book and exercises.
I remember reading an interview with Chick Corea a while back, and he was talking about the goals of practicing. He mentioned more than once that (and he was talking as a pianist, obviously) when practicing, you’re trying to achieve a “flow” in your technique and musicality. And until you can play the stuff you’re practicing with a flow, you’re not there yet. I can get the simple things to flow, but I want to press ahead too quickly.
