Piano Learning Myths DEBUNKED!

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, you're watching LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Today, piano learning myths debunked.

What really matters? Well, I've got a whole bunch of myths for you that you're going to really enjoy. And finally, the last one, it's really, a lot of these are really kind of surprising. One, the first one, and you all heard this before, that you have to work on exercises for hours. Is this true? Absolutely not. Now, is there a place for exercises? Sure, but it's an adjunct to your work at the piano. Why is this? Because the piano has the benefit of having an immense repertoire of great music. So you can solve technical problems with musical solutions. Not only that, but as I've shown, you can turn your music into exercises with different rhythms, different articulations, different dynamics, playing different, you put your hands an extra octave apart. You can do so many different things playing one hand louder than the other, bring out inner voices, play different voices with different articulations. You don't have to resort to mindless exercises that are non -musical. There are some notable exceptions. It's absolutely essential if you want to develop a solid technique at the piano, or pretty much any instrument, to have a command of all major and minor scales and arpeggios. You might want to do strategic work on octaves, on thirds, trills. There might be times where you would work on exercises. But is that the primary part of studying the piano? Absolutely not. You don't have to resort to spending hours a day on exercises. What's the next thing? It takes months to learn a piece of music. And I know a lot of people who do take months and months, and some of whom never get the pieces to the level they want them to be at. Now, this is absolutely false. Now, there are two possibilities here. Either the piece is way above what you should be working on, or much more likely, you've never been shown exactly how to practice. How many people have been shown precisely step -by -step how to practice, what to do, step one, step two. When you have the steps of how to practice, it doesn't take you months to learn a piece of music. Now, there are some exceptions here. If you're learning the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, yeah, I don't care who you are, it's going to take you months to learn that piece. It can take you years to really get a command of it, depending upon the level of player you're at. But I'm talking about, you want to learn a sonata or an etude. Again, there's always exceptions of pieces that you could spend, I think it was Joseph Levine who spent 10 years learning the double thirds etude of Chopin.

Well, I'm sure he initially learned it a lot quicker than that. But to be able to play it, if you ever want to hear the most astounding piano playing you've ever heard in your life, listen to Joseph Levine playing the double thirds etude of Chopin. I'll leave the link in the description. I should be able to find it on YouTube.

So, when practicing correctly, you learn how to learn bit by bit, putting them together, not trying to learn the whole piece and correcting mistakes that you ingrain. That's what takes all your time. It's unlearning what you've learned wrong because you try to take too much of the time. If you're interested in that, in the description you have a strategy session and I'll explain all this to you and this might be something that I can help you take your piano playing to the next level. The next one, you should curve your fingers like you're holding a ball. You've heard this before, play with rounded fingers so you're like clenching your fists and going to the piano. Well, there's some truth to this but I have to say this is a myth because really the position you want on the piano is the position that takes no effort to achieve. Take your hands, make sure you're sitting the right distance and height and just go completely limp and then drop your hands under the keyboard and they naturally will be curved. You don't feel like you're clenching a ball or curving your fingers. You're not actively curving your fingers, you're just letting them drop naturally and the position that takes absolutely no effort to maintain is the correct position on the piano. Think about that for a minute.

This should be an aha moment for some of you because if you don't have to use any effort to maintain the proper position, any effort you use is used to play your music. There's no extraneous effort that's not aligned with the purpose of playing your music. Just be totally relaxed, let the hands fall over the correct keys and you will have much much more relaxation on the piano than trying to feel like you're curving to hold a ball. What else do we have? There's a whole lot more.

Another one is you have to start when you're a young child or you'll never play well. Well, I won't say there aren't advantages to starting when you're young but I've known many people starting later in life who've done remarkable things with the piano. Now, just like learning a language, learning a language when you're really young, it comes more naturally but if you spend time and immerse yourself in music, listening to music, playing music, enjoying music, there's no age at which you can't start the piano and have great success with it. You don't have to start as a young child and I've known some really accomplished players who started later in life. Yes, it is possible. You have to know how to approach the instrument, how to practice correctly, all of that but you can do it. Believe me, I've done it with so many people and I'm sure you can do it if it's something that you really want to do. Of course, it takes time just like anything else. Alright, next one, use your practice piece for a long time before ever attempting to memorize it. You better be able to play it really well otherwise you don't have a chance of memorizing it. Let's throw that myth right out the window. That one is absolutely false. In fact, you flip it. It's exactly the opposite. You must memorize your music first.

What? This, to some of you, must sound like crazy talk. How do you memorize it first? There's a method. Once again, taking very, very small parts, then separately studying every infinitesimal detail of the score but learning such a tiny part that you can learn it quickly and then you learn the other hand the same way. Then you put them together. You learn it. You memorize it. Take little tiny pieces and then string them together as you learn each subsequent section.

What a time saver because you'll never have to face the arduous task of having to unlearn something you've learned wrong whether it's a note, a rhythm, a fingering, a phrasing, anything, a dynamic. Undoing that. How many of you out there have struggled to undo something you learned wrong and it just keeps cropping up and it drives you nuts? Well, if you memorize first, you will never, ever face that. Naturally, you can read through the pieces a couple of times at the beginning just to get acquainted but you play it more, unless you're playing it perfectly, you're actually ingraining mistakes from day one and then you're going to be able to try to wring those out of your performance and it will drive you nuts. Memorize first, not last. Next one, you must warm up with scales first. A lot of teachers, now I'm not saying it's not a good idea to warm up with scales. It's fine. But do you have to? No. You can warm up with a slow movement of Mozart and it's going to be fine for your hands. Scales you might want to wait until later in your practice session when your brain is tired of memorizing and refining and you want to just study the way your hands are working and your fingers instead of doing that first and wasting your precious concentration on something that doesn't take the same intense concentration as learning music does. It's a very different type of concentration that you can do later in your practice. Now, if you like to warm up with scales, no problem, go for it. But it's absolutely not necessary to do scales first.

Now here's one crazy myth that you would have to have perfect pitch to succeed. You know only about 1 in 10 ,000 people have perfect pitch. That's the ability to know what notes are without any relative pitch. Just absolute pitch. You hear a lawn mower outside going brrrrr and you know what note it is without even thinking about it. That's perfect pitch. Is that important? No it's not. It could be handy. You have for transcribing music. It could be nice. It can also drive you crazy. Imagine this. You've got perfect pitch. You're singing in a choir and the choir starts drifting sharp or more likely flat and you're trying to sing the notes that are on the page. You go crazy because you're hearing an absolute pitch where the rest of the group they just follow along and it's seamless experience. What is important is to develop your ear with a relative pitch. So once you have one note you can relate the notes to that note and you know what? That's essential whether you have perfect pitch or not to understand the function of the notes not just the absolute note. So you absolutely do not need perfect pitch and some of the most of the greatest pianists in the world do not have perfect pitch because it's a pretty rare phenomenon.

Another one. Only long -fingered people can play well. People with big hands. Well there are so many exceptions to that you can't even believe it. You know from Joseph Hoffman early in the 20th century.

You actually Baron Boym has smaller hands. Ivan Morovin is the great pianist. I have smaller hands. You can play with smaller hands and you know what? There are advantages to smaller hands. Are there advantages to larger hands? Yes. But there's also advantages to smaller hands. Being able to play fast and light is more effortless for somebody with smaller hands. Not only the fact that you can get between black keys.

Somebody with really big fingers can't get their fingers between those black keys. That is a real hindrance. So you don't have to have long fingers or they're all different hand shapes and people with all different types of hands and body structure and arms can play the piano effectively. You find what works for you.

Here's another one. You must practice hours every day in order to play well.

Well there are some people who play practice hours a day and they don't play well. It's not how much time you spend. It's number one how often you get to the piano. Very important because it's a cumulative process. If you practice and then you leave it for days and days and come back to it you're not going to get the continuity of learning.

And what's most important is having purpose every time you sit down to know what you're doing and how you're accomplishing something. So every minute of your practice is accomplishing something and if you do that you get a tremendous amount done even in 30 minutes. Even in 10 minutes you might get a good amount done. Whereas some people might sit at the piano kind of playing to the music halfway concentrating trying to improve it not knowing what to do spending hours not really getting the results they want. So it's not just the time you spend it's how you spend the time and how often you revisit the piano.

Here's another myth for you. Beginner piano is boring absolutely false. Why is it false? It's because there's so much great music for the piano and being able to learn anything even a simple piece. I'm going to play a very simple piece that I think is a great piece of music that is not hard to play. It's by Cuthbert Harris from the ABC manuals. Listen to this gorgeous little piece of music.

How's that for some great music? So do you have to have complicated music in order for it to be great music? Absolutely not. There is so much great music on the piano at all levels. It's one of the things the blessings about the piano. You can't even begin to approach the wealth of great music on all different levels that the piano has on any other instrument. It really is the most extensive repertoire of any any instrument.

Finally you need a grand piano to learn properly or you need an acoustic piano or a fine instrument.

Obviously it's fun to have a better instrument and it's rewarding but you can learn on a good weighted action digital for $500 or $700 and you can get really far or an upright can take you really far.

Now eventually you may need to graduate to a grand for the speed of the action, the tonal shadings that are possible but you absolutely can do very well learning to play the piano without having to have a grand piano or even an acoustic piano. You can get very far. I have students on digital pianos doing amazingly well. So these are some myths on the piano. I want you to put it in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. What was the most surprising one to you and if you have any other myths put them in there. Let's hear from all of you. Keep this conversation going. Again I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks for joining me.

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