Learning to Play Piano as an Adult

When I was 26 years old I started learning to play the piano. For several months I toiled on my own, thinking that being "self-taught" would be so much cooler than learning from a piano teacher. Then one day my 7 year old daughter asked if she could take piano lessons, so I signed her up with a local instructor. After about two lessons she was already ahead of me, and I realized that being "self-taught" was for the birds. I decided to take piano lessons, too (from the same teacher as my daughter), and that's when I started to make real progress.

I began by learning the basics of note reading and fingering while playing songs out of children's method books. It was okay at first, because I didn't expect to be a virtuoso right away. But after about two years I started to get pretty frustrated. I thought that after spending so much time at the piano I should be a lot better than I was, and I wanted to play songs that were more musically satisfying. I got a new job around this time and was pretty busy, so I quit taking lessons and probably would have stopped playing altogether were it not for my music-loving daughter who asked me to play piano for her every night when I tucked her into bed.

I was still progressing, but at a very slow rate, and I was still very frustrated. That was when I decided to learn another instrument, and I picked up a low-priced guitar at a local music store. While learning to play guitar I started to make connections about chords and the piano. I had always felt that playing chord-style piano was "cheating," and I didn't find it very musically satisfying to simply play a block chord (like C-E-G) at the beginning of each measure. Sure, it filled in the harmony part, but it left a lot to be desired (and some songs, particularly classical compositions, didn't lend themselves to chord-style playing at all). One night after a frustrating practice session I did an Internet search for "adult piano lessons" and ended up purchasing an ebook written by Dan Starr called "How to Win at Piano Lessons" (www.danstarr.com). This helpful book dispelled many of the incorrect beliefs I held about learning to play the piano.

Soon afterward I attended a piano concert, and as I exited the performance hall and entered the lobby I heard someone playing the piano just as well as the performer I had just paid to see. I walked up and asked him what he was playing, and he said it was an improvisation. I was amazed and asked if he would be willing to teach me.

I began my first lesson with him by playing a song I had learned while studying with my previous piano teacher. There were a lot of hesitations and missed notes (partly due to performance anxiety and partly due to my limited abilities). After such a performance, most teachers probably would have coughed politely and said something like, "Well, it looks like we have a lot of work to do!" But he looked at me after I finished and said, "I think you're better than that."

I only had four lessons with him, but they lasted three hours each. At each of these lessons we spent about thirty minutes on piano instruction (he taught me how to improvise and compose and how to play more interesting chord-style piano with arpeggios and inversions and octaves). Then we spent the rest of the time working through the emotional baggage I had accumulated surrounding the piano (he was a motivational literature buff and aspiring public speaker, so this was an area in which he excelled). Chief among my erroneous beliefs was that I would never be a competent pianist because I hadn't taken lessons as a child.

With the tools he gave me and much of my emotional baggage behind me, I began to excel. I played chord-style songs, composed my own music, improvised, studied music theory and even started taking traditional lessons again to improved my site reading capabilities. I played everything from hymns and jazz to new age and classical. I spent about an hour a day at the piano and began to perform more frequently for audiences, slowly overcoming my performance anxiety as my confidence and skills and experience expanded. I spent a lot of "quality" time with a metronome (learning to play "2 against 3" was particularly difficult for me) and took a very cerebral approach to piano. I'm still not very good at playing difficult classical music, and faster songs can be quite challenging. But at the age of 35 I am an intermediate/late intermediate player and am continuing to progress. A few years ago I even started teaching piano lessons.

While I was busy developing my skills, my daughter continued to take traditional piano lessons. I didn't realize it at the time, but as she got older she began to resent the inane music in her method books and probably would have quit playing altogether if her studies hadn't been supplemented by more enjoyable songs (some of which came from me as I searched for more satisfying music to play). When her teacher got a full-time job and had to close her studio, my daughter asked me to instruct her. I was amazed, because I had been expecting her to zoom past me at some point since she had started playing at age 7 and I had started playing at age 26, but there she was asking me to teach her after only taking 4 years of lessons when she had taken 7 or 8. Learning as an adult, in spite of my emotional baggage, had actually allowed me to develop more quickly than her and it helped me understand things such as music theory at a much deeper level. It also helped that I already knew how to learn and how to overcome obstacles. My daughter plays well instinctively and is an excellent site reader, whereas I tend to approach problems more academically and can usually work through them with the help of Google, a metronome, and frequent repetition. We each excel in the areas of music we have studied (for example, I am better at playing hymns and jazz and ballads than she is, but she is better at playing movie music and faster songs). But I am thoroughly convinced that the only disadvantages to learning music as an adult were psychological--because I held an erroneous belief, reinforced by incorrect societal views about early development, that music was something that could only be learned in childhood. I am grateful that I never gave up, and as a reward for my perseverance I've gained a lifelong skill and thoroughly enjoyable hobby.