Also tried in learning piano on my own, and pretty fast ended up taking real classes with a teacher. Piano is like tennis, you can easily develop bad habits and they are extremely hard to remove.
I was self taught on piano for years, and when I finally started taking lessons I had so many bad habits to break that were holding me back.
Reading notes was not the problem, but my technique for how I was physically striking the keys needed a lot of attention. Legato, phrasing and dynamics are the real challenge and it’s tough to practice things with such subtlety on digital keyboards at all. I still do it, but every time I play on a real piano I have to recalibrate.
The author says he chose a piano without weighted keys, I think that’s ultimately not the right choice if you are truly interested in learning piano and eventually want your skills to translate to a real piano. Pretty early on the proper technique is based on weighted keys.
I picked up piano when I was 25. After decade of playing other instruments being self taught I've decided to try to replicate formal education: basically I was taking classes intended for small kids (using private teacher), both theory, practice and study piece.
It was quite weird to play some weird kids melodies, but it was fun and being adult I was able to finish one year of child education withing one month. It was interesting experience and it really help me with understanding music.
btw I had to learn to play directly from sheet, which was something I had never done, so I've create small app to help me with that: http://notationtraining.com (you can even plug the midi keyboard for practice).
Reading notes was not the problem, but my technique for how I was physically striking the keys needed a lot of attention. Legato, phrasing and dynamics are the real challenge and it’s tough to practice things with such subtlety on digital keyboards at all. I still do it, but every time I play on a real piano I have to recalibrate.
The author says he chose a piano without weighted keys, I think that’s ultimately not the right choice if you are truly interested in learning piano and eventually want your skills to translate to a real piano. Pretty early on the proper technique is based on weighted keys.