3 Ways to Learn Piano (Most Adults Choose Wrong)

I just got off a call with a new student let's call him bill bill is in his 50s he took classical lessons for a few years as a teenager and now he's picking it back up he wants to accompany his wife who sings and plays songs at their

local open mic night specific tangible goal love it he had another specific goal his dream would be to be able to learn two songs per week but here's the problem Bill played me this pop ballad

he'd been working on he didn't have it fully down but he could play most of it and it sounded good he'd been learning it for three months and I think understandably he felt a little discouraged how do you go from a pace of

learning about four songs a year to learning two songs a week Hint it is not practicing 26 times harder I walked him through exactly how and that is what I'm going to show you in this video let me

just say this approach works best for pop rock folk country those styles of music particularly if you're playing accompaniment for a singer whether that is yourself or someone else classical is

a different beast and so is jazz to some extent but as far as I can see there are three main approaches to learning this type of song Bill had tried sort of a combination of the first two and it makes sense why it was taking him so

long the best way to learn songs fast is the third approach and that's the approach I use to learn songs to teach on this channel I'm going to take you through each approach using House of the Rising Sun as an example and I actually

just recently did a tutorial video on that the first approach is reading sheet music if you Google House of the Rising Sun piano sheet music you'll probably find your way to something like this

looks pretty intimidating now if you're one of the very few people that started classical lessons as a kid and practiced for the hours that your teacher wanted you to and kept that up for years this

might be the quickest way to learn House of the Rising Sun that is assuming it's a good and accurate transcript which sadly is really often not the case now Bill remembered enough from his old

lessons that he was able to start learning his song using sheet music but he was painstakingly figuring it out note by note many people know how to read sheet music but it's super

inefficient if you can't truly sight read and know the way for Bill to hit his goals of being able to learn two songs a week is not to spend the next 10 years trying to become a fluent sight reader like I said sheet music is very

efficient for those who have the skill but it's not accessible for most people so the first approach is out the second approach is one that hasn't existed until pretty recently and that's watching YouTube videos with the midi

visualizer display you know the falling colored notes you've probably seen it these are great in a way because unlike sheet music it is super easy to understand so you could search on YouTube House of the Rising Sun piano tutorial and click on one of the popular

videos with the following blocks and piece by piece imitate it slowing down the playback speed memorizing memorize it but if you don't understand the bigger picture of what's happening it's just this endless parade of notes

Falling by the time you're working on the middle of the song You've forgot in the beginning so while it is accessible it's really inefficient so the second approach is out and I'd be curious to know what your experience has been on either of these first two approaches let

me know in the comments so the third method is to use a chord-based approach if you've done any of my piano tutorials especially if you followed along with my chords and lyrics charts you're probably familiar with this idea but the thing is

if you get really good at this you don't need to watch tutorial videos to learn the songs this approach works by thinking of songs the way that most of their creators did you know famously The Beatles couldn't read sheet music but

that's true for most pop and rock musicians instead it gets at the core of what drives the music the underlying chord progression once you know the chord shapes in the order to play them in everything else is just decoration

The rhythms arpeggios inversions here's how I learned House of the Rising Sun so that I could teach it on my channel I searched House of the Rising Sun chords which took me to ultimate guitar which

is the biggest database of chord charts and usually comes up first so because I've practiced all my chord shapes and know the formula for finding them I can immediately start blocking out the chords A minor

C d F and I know it often sounds best to add left hand bass notes so I add that in

maybe a little bit of Rhythm in the right hand and it already sounds like the song I could sing along and that could be my version there is

[Music] but of course if I listen to the recording I hear that the guitar is doing an arpeggio pattern four notes it sounds like up and down

and then back down and conveniently I'm doing four notes for each of these chords one in the left three in the right so I can just kind of start doing

that that up and down thing I'm hearing and it helps to know that this is kind of a common arpeggio pattern that I've practiced before in other songs and so

now that's really sounding like it there is a house in New Orleans now in this case there's a final level

to getting it really accurate and that is a lot of the chords are in inversions if I listen carefully to the recording I can hear that the top note the highest note in the arpeggio for both the a

minor and the C chord is the same note I've done a lot of inversion practice so it's quick for me to find an inversion on a c chord that keeps the E on top like it is at the top of the a minor chord

[Music] and using my ear in that same way I can piece together all the inversions foreign

so much of getting better at playing by ear is just having a bigger toolkit of rhythms and inversions and arpeggios that you can start to recognize in songs and then apply them to the chord

progressions and having that toolkit allows you to get creative with the chord progression and maybe make your version unique it doesn't all have to be about accuracy but don't let all those possibilities intimidate you using this

approach you can sound good right away just blocking out those chords and singing along can sound great and then every step along your journey is satisfying and fun as you gradually add

those more advanced elements so a chord-based approach is definitely my favorite because it is both accessible and efficient and I just want to say you don't have to learn this process for me there are a lot of great teachers out

there using a core based approach but if you're looking for a roadmap to build up these skills and tricks for transforming chord progressions into beautiful music you might like my chorus piano chord breakthroughs in that course I help you

get a ton of rhythms and patterns into your muscle memory you get to see my thought process step by step as I develop three different songs from simple to complex that process can be

applied to any core based song which is most songs so check out piano chord breakthroughs using that link down in the description it has helped hundreds of people level up their chord playing game and can help you too and thanks for watching I hope parsing out these

different methods helped clarify things for you and to be clear I don't want to totally dismiss the first two approaches sometimes songs will have a moment or two that's a little harder to get by ear and that's when you can cross reference

with a piece of sheet music or a following a piano note video I definitely do that as well but it's like a little tool you can use not the main method if you're newer to the world of piano accompaniment playing and you want

to learn songs super fast a chord-based approach is your best bet the first step on that path is to be able to quickly find the chords you see on a chord chart and this video will help with that a ton

have an awesome day see you soon