Piano Playing Tips

1. Personality

When choosing a teacher you need to ensure that you ‘get on well’ with each other. You need to ensure that you will want to keep going back to the same person as you like their style of teaching. Teaching yourself won’t provide a clash or personalities but can be considered as not having the same amount of ‘support’ and guidance as a recognized teacher.

2. Credentials and Experience

It is important to understand the experience, qualifications and credentials that piano teachers have. You need to make sure that you are being taught be someone who cares about developing your style of play rather than seeing money signs. The benefit about Rocket Piano is that the course has been designed by a professional pianist who has experience in teaching and understanding limits and requirements for the newbie pianist.

3. What will you learn

Apart from learning to play you need to ensure that you are learning the correct way to play. Many teachers work by the book and aim to put you through exams. Although you will learn, it will be very limited learning and not particularly versatile. With teaching yourself essentially you can choose and develop a variety of styles, even train yourself to take the exams as well.

4. Can you improvise

Apart from being able to play the piano, the other skill of being a competent played is the ability to improvise. This can be taken in several ways. Firstly to play what you read in front of you with feeling (loud and soft) or to be taken literally by playing something off the cuff following a chord pattern. As part of your development, you should also look at improvisation. You will learn many playing skills as well as the skill to improvise.

5. Variety

To be a versatile pianist you need to be able to learn and play a variety of styles and genres. You need to ensure that your teacher will teach you the variety of genres and the way to play them. When teaching yourself the piano, you can choose which pieces to play and are not limited by the choice of a teacher.

6. Cost

The cost of private tuition these days can be a big investment. After purchasing your piano or renting it, then having to provide funds every week or fortnight to a tutor, the figures can add up over a year. The actual cost of teaching yourself is very minimal. Books are $10-20 a time and even resources such as Rocket Piano cost well below the market rate for one lesson with a private tutor.

As mentioned at the beginning of this website, there is a particular teaching resource that I strongly recommend. Written by Ruth Searle, a professional pianist with many years experience teaching the piano, you will be able to teach yourself the piano covering the topics mentioned above. This course is a breakthrough in teaching yourself the piano through the internet. Further information about the course can be found by clicking here or if you want to go straight to her website you can click here.