Piano
 

Do you play it?

I just began teaching myself recently, so if any of you have helpful tips, hints, tricks, etc. I'd love to learn them.

Don't get arthritis.

I'm hopeful to start drumming soon. Unlike guitar, I want to learn to read music and learn it the right way.

I'd say, coming from muscling through guitar for 20 yrs to take your time up front. Wish I would've done it back them.

Helpful tip No. 1: Don't teach yourself. Find a teacher. All you're going to do is teach yourself bad habits.

As a kid I could have had free lessons.

Of course, I didn't do that, because I was a 5'6" badass from the midwest.

We "pushed" (found rich kids and threw them up against the hallway's) for money after school.

Hard to imagine piano lessons would pay off more that being a total d!ck-whad in the long term scope of things...

Depends on what you want to do. Lots of people just want to play SOMETHING and don't really care what. Ideally, they learn the instrument so that when they enter the home of somebody who has a piano, they can sit down and play some tunes.

Other people I know learn piano because they hear a piece of music that inspires them to learn how to play it.

Lessons are never a bad idea if you're serious about learning the instrument properly, but oftentimes people get put with bad teachers who either don't teach students how to play properly, or they put their students through a rigid series of method books that suck out some of the enjoyment of learning the instrument. Method books can be good, but with adult learners they usually go by too slowly, so material and techniques become much harder to learn

What's your musical experience up to this point? Do you read music? Do you know about key signatures and the primary basics of music theory? What do you ideally hope to gain from learning to play piano?

I've got a pretty solid musical background. Can read music, understand key sigs, time changes, etc.

I don't really hope to gain much, more of being able to get my fingers used to it. I can read music just fine, but my hand positioning is absolutely horrific and I ****ing hate how horrible I am at it despite knowing where my fingers should go.

Just briefly, consider some of these points:

1. Are you right or left handed? For a lot of people they claim coordination between the two hands is what's throwing them off (hand position) but all that's really happening is that one hand is just weaker than the other and less independent. They can play their right hand with relative ease, and sometimes the left hand when played alone, but when put together, the left is the cause of most of the mistakes that causes both hands to do screwy things.

Possible solution: Isolate the left hand part only and play it at a tempo where you can hit all the notes accurately and effortlessly. Take that tempo you just played and now do hands together at HALF of that tempo. When you play hands together, play the left hand twice as loud; sing along with it if you have to if it will help you hear the left hand part over the right hand. Yes, some of the tempos can be QUITE slow in this mode of practice, so usually I only suggest this technique for musicians who have a good concept of pulse of time. It sounds like your musical experience is more than enough to handle this.

2. Sometimes people get their hand position messed up because the arm/hand makes too many wild gestures when playing the easy stuff. So they do slow practice to iron out the notes, but they still get mixed up. If the music gives fingering suggestions, play through them and see if you like them. If they don't leave any fingering suggestions, write some in. They serve as a trail of breadcrumbs for your muscle memory when you further get acclimated with the music. Depending on what type of music you're playing (scaley, notey, chords, fast, slow, leaps, chromatic) it may help to change articulations with these fingerings. Try playing everything staccato (hands separately, taking detail to activate the note from the finger, and not using up and down movement of your whole arm or wrist). Try playing everything legato.

3. If it's a tough passage of chords that's giving you problems, remember that as your hands move around the keyboard to play different notes, every bit of unnecessary motion can create the potential for errors in hand position (overshooting, undershooting, etc.) A helpful technique for working around that is to move from chord to chord, out of rhythm, making mental notes about where each hand is moving.

For instance, let's say the movement from Chord A to Chord B gives me problems every time. First, play Chord A. Hold the position. While you're holding, look at Chord B in the music. Take mind of which notes are in the chord. Locate them on the keyboard (STILL holding Chord A). Take your time, as much time as you need, even if it's 5 minutes, to mentally map out where the hands need to move to next on the keyboard and what each finger needs to do. Only when you're ready to make the change and are ABSOLUTELY certain that you will strike Chord B 100% accurately should you make the change. Rinse and repeat only between Chord A and Chord B for a few times... 5-10 cycles. DON'T depend on this technique too often, because it can turn you into a chord roller. The idea is to improve the response time between reading the chord and translating that to your muscle memory. Doing this too much can sometimes encourage the bad habit of hunting and pecking, which makes music pieces far more difficult and inefficient to learn.

If you are working on any specific items of repertoire, let me know. I'm classically trained, so I know just about every single piece in the book. I have experience with jazz, so I'm also not too bad at giving tips on improvisation.

If you're learning piano so you can play the theme song to The Office, I can't and won't help you.

When can I play your drumkit!