[AlbertCory]

A good book. Although this statement:

While writing it, I discovered that piano pedagogy had never been researched, documented, and analyzed properly

is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it.

I was an Adult Beginner, which is sorta a Thing. My teacher had about 12 adult students, and we had separate recitals from the kids. The hidden reason for this is, you don't want to hear some 9-year-old kid who plays better than you ever will.

Almost all of the other adults had played as a child and given it up. Many teachers won't take adults like me because they have unrealistic ideas about how good they're going to be. The truth is, you are not going to be very good, and lots of people who are orders of magnitude better than you can't make any real money playing piano, because that level of skill is so common.

The interesting thing about how our brains work is: I could memorize effortlessly, but I couldn't sight read worth shit. There are other people who are the exact opposite.

Lastly, one thing they said really resonated with me:

The first thing that must be done is to eliminate the habits of stopping and backtracking (stuttering), at every mistake. The best time to develop the skill of not stopping at every mistake is when you begin your first piano lessons.

OMG, in the recitals there was one lady who just had to play every note correctly, no matter how many times she had to try. She stopped at every mistake and "corrected" it, until you wanted to scream at her.

[narag]

The truth is, you are not going to be very good, and lots of people who are orders of magnitude better than you can't make any real money playing piano, because that level of skill is so common.

This isn't so much of a problem if your intention is not playing professionally. Learning easy and intermediate pieces is a lot of fun. Also making your own music using a MIDI keyboard and a DAW.

[catlikesshrimp]

It does help to compose game music if you feel more comfortable around a synth. For people who like learning new abilities!

[narag]

Is it a job? Where could I find someone that pays for music?

[NikolaNovak]

Interesting, I didn't think any adult would try to learn instrument as an adult with goal of making money. I guess I happened to know professional amazing orchestra players who practiced hours every day since they were 6... And were mostly still dirt poor. So when I started piano lessons at tender age of 40, it did not come with any illusions of riches and fame compared to wizards who were three and a half decades ahead of me :-).

But I'm still having so much fun!! Playing simple piano pieces or fooling around with synth or arranger or playing with my kids etc. Piano has such a low barrier of entry to just tinkle around, and such phenomenal keyboards can be had for so little money used if you research a bit, I feel totally spoiled :-). There's YouTube videos and online lessons and awesome books for any style.

My one tip to adult learners - understand that music theory is not the same as learning to play is not the same as learning music notation / sight reading. Traditional music teachers with captive audience of 10 year olds whose parents force them to attend, start with notes reading which has no pay off for unbelievable amount of time. As a busy motivated adult there's no shame and lots of advantages to first learn your way around the instrument and a few songs or improv, even some good theory, before conittibg yourself to grind and learn by rote of music notation. It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately. Especially as piano has different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D

[sseagull]

Yes, I feel like the focus on making money is misplaced.

I started lessons in my early 30s, (although had a strong background in music before). Never had an interest in performing.

I view it like going to the gym. I don't lift weights to win some sort of weightlifting competition. So similarly I view playing piano as exercise for my mind, particularly areas which don't get as much of a workout programming and whatnot.

And while I do go to recitals where kids 25 years younger than me play harder pieces, I bet I can program a lot better than they can (probably) :)

[andrepd]

What's the deal with learning basic notation being made to be so difficult? It's by far one of the easiest parts of learning to play an instrument.

>It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately.

What? How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music? You'd have to develop your ear, which is much harder than learning to read music x)

> Especially as piano has different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D

It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.

[compiler-guy]

People have been developing their ears their whole lives. It isn’t that hard to take that and convert it to keys.

I play several instruments but can only read music for piano. Guitar, banjo, and harmonica I play entirely by ear or sometimes with some tablature to get started.

[NikolaNovak]

Primarily, it's about payoff / benefit.

Imagine you're 40 years old and you've never played an instrument. You have limited ambition - you want to have fun and play a little bit around campfire. How do you start, let's say on a guitar:

1. I show you G, C, D chords and print out a simple, easily understandable chart you can take home. You now can play hundreds of songs after 30 min lesson and a few mins of practice. You can spend time playing around and slowly learning rhythm, strumming techniques and patterns, while singing to your songs and getting a feel for your instrument. A week or three later I show you E-minor and now you can play virtually every pop song made in last 20 years. [1] If you get excited and interested, we throw in Aminor, and eventually F Major and now you know power chords and you're the master of it all. You're having fun, you're playing, you're improving, and you're having FUN. You can focus on good techniques and sounding good. When and if you want more, we can learn basic music theory and pentatonic patterns, and then one day if you're serious and ready for some pain, you can learn some staff notation.

Or!

2. I give you some books and tell you to learn notes. You download an app or six to enable you to mindlessly practices notes every day. You spend months studying by rote and can maybe play Twinkle Twinkle Little star, poorly. But it's academic because you gave up a long time before you got there as there was no FUN to be had and you have children and work and household chores and this is a poor investment of your precious, precious time.

>>How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music?

I mean, it's 2021. Look around. We are SPOILED for choices when it comes to learning! There's pianote and flowkey and casio lk line and songsterr and YouTube and tablature and karaoke apps and anything and everything. It's wonderful and we should embrace that every person can learn differently and enjoy themselves! :)

FWIW, I've played Amelie on piano, Green Onions on organ, I want to Break free on synth and made some small synthwave songs entirely from scratch without reading music (but with thorough understanding of what I was playing - keys and changes and transitions and inversions) . I've recorded a cover version of White room including Rhythm and Solo, and now play bass in a 3 piece band, for fun, without needing to read music. Yes I've learned it eventually, but frankly as a 43 year old it's brought no benefit yet in the two years since I've done so.

YES if you are a pro dedicated musician interacting with others you must learn it. But I think a lot of old-school musicians forget or don't want to understand what it's like to be a casual adult player who just wants to have some fun and jam. Empathy is lacking. Just because previous generation went through some enforced painful rite of passage, doesn't mean everybody has to - let's have an actual discussion on specific customized learning path that benefits each person's goals and constraints.

------------------

Second point, I firmly believe, especially for Hacker-News audience, is that learning staff notation too early is counter-productive. It gives enormous undeserved privilege and primacy to C major and it prevents you from making crucial connections early on. In Western 12 note equal temperament, there are 12 notes. That's it, 12 notes, repeating. You can start wherever you want and it's the same. You don't care if you start from C or Bb. There are patterns and intervals and triads and chords and things that sound good that are completely relative and you can learn SO much without staff notation messing you up. Then you do learn staff notation, and you realize it's always lying to you. The spaces on staff notation are not representative to anything in the real world. Between E and F there's one semitone; but between F and G there are two semitones, even though they are the same spacing on the staff. And if you move from the safety of C major to anything else, you are SCREEEEEWED as na adult student wanting to have fun. Notation stops any pretense of sense logic and patterns and it's a quagmire of flats and sharps you're supposed to remember as you painfully make your way through. It takes something beautiful, built on relative patterns, and jams that lovely circle into jagged square hole that's on fire. Yes, eventually, you need to learn the same stupid crippling language everybody else uses, but that's not in any way to say that the language is beautiful or practical or helpful. It's just the notation we're stuck in Western music.

-----

I think most importantly, a lot of people completely conflate "music theory" with "staff notation".

I've spent a long time reading "Music Theory books" which just want to teach you staff notation, which has zero explanatory powers (and I firmly believe has negative initial explanatory value). Finally, I came upon on this [2] book, which starts with "If you want to learn staff notation, awesome; we have a sibling book for that; but this is a book on music theory which is independent on any specific notation system". I read that book and every page was revelation and insight and made me a better player. Modern motivated geeky interested enthusiastic adults don't have to be stuck in the method that our grandparents taught captive 10 year olds.

I dunno, maybe it'll blow your mind, maybe you cannot see it, but I could discuss dominant 7th and minor harmonics and modes and pentatonics and intervals and triads and augmented & diminished and all that good, meaty, fun, fascinating, geeky stuff with my instructor without needing or referencing staff notation at all.

>>It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.

That explains precisely nothing. It's not even circular, it's a rote memorized factoid thrown out instead of explanation that can be understood and discussed. The bass and treble are off by two. Two!!! If you truly cannot see that for a student, let alone for anybody, it would've been better if Piano staffs were same notes but one or two straight octaves apart, I feel you're not making an effort to see it from anybody else's eyes. My challenge is to find a practical, discussable reason two hands on same piano are off by two notes on staff that has inherent value and cannot be trivially reduced to "because 18th century grouchy Austrians said so" :)

>>It's by far one of the easiest parts of learning to play an instrument.

Well that's just wrong, but we can agree to STROOOONGLY disagree on this one :P

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ

2: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1986061833/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...

[oriolid]

> Second point, I firmly believe, especially for Hacker-News audience, is that learning staff notation too early is counter-productive.

I'd like to add that in 2021 learning writing and reading is counter-productive. Text-to speech and vice versa software is widely available, and spelling rules for English require a ridiculous effort for little benefit except backwards compatibility with legacy books. As an adult learner you are SCREEEEWED even trying to figure out how to pronounce the things written above.

[NikolaNovak]

I think that's intended as sarcasm, and uncharitably ignores my point was order of priorities, not absolutes; but sure, things like that Should be discussed - e. G. My ex-father-in-law was Insistent that kids MUST be taught cursive. When challenged why, he gave no particular reason other than to repeat it a lot.

More to the point though, Kids ARE taught speech FIRST (as is my point with an instrument)! They in fact DO learn complex sentences and language patterns and communication way way before we teach them writing. We are not even contemplating teaching 1 year olds writing before we teach them language. So you are 100% making my point for me :).

Similarly in languages, I once went through 2 years of learning foreign language by rote memorization of tenses and rules and declensions and it was awful (this was not in North America) . Got nobody in the class anywhere. 10 A-plus students couldn't make a conversational sentence after 2 years. Much more success is accomplished by teaching people here to speak and understand language first.

And again to address different part of your comment and my point: I claim staff notation for people who WANT to understand patterns and theory In music can be counterproductive. Get the feel for relativity of keys first, before we smash C major up your throat. Alphabets by and large aren't that counterproductive, so it's a bit of a false comparison on that level too, though we can have a good discussion of phonetic alphabets vs whatever the heck English has. Staff notation is not inherently logical and representative of patterns in 12 note equal temperament. It's just an archaic system we are stuck in though others have been proposed. It's qwerty! :)

Through all of this tough, I don't see an actual counter argument - this seems to always get people riled up and upset, But why SHOULD an adult wanting to strum or jam and have some fun, be taught staff notation FIRST? What goal does it accomplish, why is that a beneficial order of operation, other than "that's how I was taught"? Let's have a charitable, productive honest discussion :)

[oriolid]

Honest question: Did you read my post and write that all by yourself? If yes, why are you so hostile to the idea that music can be effectively communicated through writing and reading? Yes, you can teach a beginner to strum a few chords without any context, but once you want to play with others you need some concepts to be able to communicate and when you have to learn those concepts writing them down is the easy part.

Your language course sounds really odd to me and I'm not sure if I should believe it actually happened.

I don't really get why you are so hung up with C major. Sure, if you play piano the first few pieces are probably in C major unless one of them is Chopsticks but the method books that I have seen have all exercises in different keys almost from the beginning.

[rectang]

> She stopped at every mistake and "corrected" it, until you wanted to scream at her.

I had a college instrumental performance professor yell at me to "sit still" because this was happening all the time at our weekly recital hour, it was driving me crazy, and I would jerk, or shake my head or hang it, or facepalm, or clench my fists.

They were right to call me out because I was being rude and I toned down my reactions after that, but... ugh. I hate that the professors tolerated that — it was such a disservice to their students.

[AlbertCory]

I know! It IS rude. But it's hard not to cringe.

Just think "poker face."

[rectang]

The audience is rooting for you. They want to experience something special.

They want you to blow through glitches without drawing attention to them or even thinking about them, because that's how you bring them along in a shared, spellbinding experience.

[coldtea]

>is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it.

None of the above refute the parent's statement. They author is aware there are such things as piano pedagody groups and books. Key word here is "properly" (which might be accurate or not, but that's what should be refuted).

[eredengrin]

Yep, fully agree. "researched, documented, and analyzed properly" is a very particular method of doing things, and much of the music pedagogy is pretty much "it worked for me and I'm good (or it worked for them and they're good), so it will work for you too". Which is true sometimes and very much not true other times. It's often a very conservative field (not in the political way, but in the sense of resisting change/doing it the traditional way), so if someone comes in and actually studies things with a more scientific sort of approach, there's no guarantee it will be accepted or catch on.

At least in the family of brass instruments, I am fairly confident that they're largely still living in the dark ages and often don't understand fundamentally how the instrument is even played, at least from a scientific/physical perspective, so good luck if you end up with a teacher/professor who expects you to play one way when in reality you'd probably be much better off playing another way. This happened to me early on and I eventually learned that there has in fact been some pretty good research and documentation into brass technique but it's pretty niche and lots of music professors pretty much entirely disregard it because of the above point about it being a very conservative field. Donald Reinhardt is kind of the one who kicked off a lot of that movement but there's a number of people who have been carrying on that work.

If a similar thing has been happening in the piano field I wouldn't be at all surprised (although I do think that the brass field is particularly ripe for things to go rotten in this way just because the brass embouchure is particularly complicated and also hard to observe).

[AlbertCory]

Just as an aside: a couple years ago I was hanging with a professional French Horn player at the dog park, and never having played one, I thought it would be amusing to try it. I had no aspirations of really being good. I was honest with him about my lack of ambition and he was fine with it.

So I got one for cheap, and took a couple lessons from him. Damn, that thing is hard!

[eredengrin]

Very interesting, professional performers in the classical music world are relatively hard to come by since it's so competitive. It certainly takes a lot of practice to make it start to sound somewhat good and the professionals are on a whole other level. The amount of competition to get a job in a professional orchestra makes a google interview look like a piece of cake. Although I would say you probably got a bit unlucky with instrument choice, out of all the brass instruments, french horn is generally regarded as being the hardest. Haven't ever tried myself but I don't doubt it.

[AlbertCory]

Yeah, for sure. Scott is on The List (my term), those guys who've passed the test and can fill in for your sick Horn player. So he's played with almost every orchestra in the Bay Area.

He played at LucasFilm for a couple weeks, to build their library of sounds. He said for that one week, he made more money than his son in high tech.

[AlbertCory]

I'm dubious about "properly". As she said, I found lots of instruction similar to hers, including the books she herself cited. The music stores are full of them.

The one thing about piano teaching, similar to dog training, playing golf, and so many other areas, is:

Every teacher thinks every other teacher is full of it.

[AlbertCory]

I should clarify one thing about "making money":

You would think you could play at rehearsals for a community theater group. Those are really low budget organizations and a lot of the staff doesn't even get paid. The rehearsal pianist got paid $50 for the entire show.

Even that guy is way better than most of us will ever be.

[scottious]

> OMG, in the recitals there was one lady who just had to play every note correctly, no matter how many times she had to try. She stopped at every mistake and "corrected" it, until you wanted to scream at her.

oh man, that is frustrating! Somebody once said that a good musician will make their mistakes sound musical. Thinking that you must stop to correct a mistake is a fundamental misunderstanding about how music is perceived. I don't blame her though, I was once like this too. I think this is the default behavior for many adult beginners especially.

[makeitdouble]

> The hidden reason for this is, you don't want to hear some 9-year-old kid who plays better than you ever will.

A surprise I had is that 9 yo is an advanced age in musical spheres. There’s international young pianist competitions won by 10~11 year olds. They are usually bound to become pro players, so not the average kid in your local music school, but it’s a good frame of mind for thinking about how good a 10 yo can be.

[esistgut]

I think you are being too hard on "adult beginners". I'm not sure if it is relatable but I'm learning guitar, just finished my second year self teaching it. I can't see myself as a guitar player just yet but I'm starting to have a clear perception of the stuff I have to learn and more importantly the stuff music players around me know and I'm pretty sure I can reach and overtake them. I'm thinking about "average level skills", there will always be a 8 years old kid with better abilities but I find the idea of comparing oneself to the whole world is unhealthy and far from fair. This doesn't apply only to music: the mere existance of Fabrice Bellard should prevent me from ever reaching a computer keyboard ever again.

I live in Italy, here there are two kind of musicians: 1) conservatory majors, with really really strong "fundamentals" but none to zero improvisation skills 2) other people who followed a learning path of anglo-saxon derivation, usually they have some degree of play-by-ear and improvisation skills but they show a severe lack on fundamentals skills. By "fundamentals" I mean sight reading (meant as sight reading on first sight, everyone can read with enough time), ability to sing what you want to play in tune before playing it, strong inner sense of time and subdivision, knowledge of theory and harmony. Side note: if you ever see musicians perform in Italy (maybe this applies to other European countries like Germany and France too) there is a very easy way to recognize if they have a classical / conservatory background: look at their feet. If they tap a foot there is a very strong chance they have no classical background as it is seen as the kind of baby wheels thing that prevents solfege from developing a strong inner sense of time.

Back on topic: as you can see there are these big two big subsets of music learning. What I'm doing is simply mix them: I study sight reading and solfege (trying to sing in tune) but at the same time I spend time transcribing by ear and following improvisation methods. There are some very strong sinergies in this: the ability to sing (in tune, not mumbling it) makes transcribing orders of magnitude easier. Same applies to knowledge of harmonic motions. Doing progressive reading exercises vastly improved my ability to play and understand odd rhythmic patterns to the point I can actually sense the lack of precision they have when I play in a garage band with my friends (not professional musicians but they have been playing for more than 20 years).

To make an even simpler example: I can play without looking at my guitar, a lot of people can't. This feel a lot like seeing people unable to type on a computer keyboard without looking at it.

[AlbertCory]

Funny about tapping your feet!

On stage in choruses, I would do it, but only inside my shoes (with my toe) so no one could see it. I see nothing wrong with it, but then, I didn't go to conservatory.

I never sang in a gospel choir, but I would hope that in those, it's not only permitted, it's encouraged. Along with swinging your arms & your head, and bobbing up and down.