Move this to ByWOrd – and do propper LAYOUT on
Music, it is such a universal pleasure. All cultures, all countries seem to love music. Music of the people (lets call it folk music) seems to be everywhere.

Status now

There is Church music and Classical music but music of the people must be the most prevalent. Everyone wants to enjoy music and the desire to play music, surely is in all of us.  Music is in the school curriculum and the colleagues of music appear to continue to thrive.  So why doesn’t everyone in the educated West, just play music? Perhaps not everyone wants to?  I think we have been very much more successful teaching the population to read and write our national languages than we have been getting everyone  playing music. Listening to music is another matter – it seems, just about everyone does listen to music.

My view on how anyone, at any age, can go about learning to play music, freely,

This is a personal view on how absolutely anybody can go about learning to play music, and to play it as freely as we read and write.  This is perhaps is controversial.  It comes down to this,

Playing  music is not primarily a knowledge discipline but rather a performance discipline.   We can learn those performance skills just as we learn many others like driving cars.   We just need to do a little every day until it becomes second nature and then continue to build on top of what we have already consolidated. 

My personal journey learning music as an adult faltered because I had never learnt any performance skills in my life – only knowledge skills – and I ended up trying to learn music the same way as all the other knowledge things I had previously learnt.  I didn’t get the core concept that I needed to repeat whatever it was I was then learning, every day for about 4 weeks so that it got lodged into subconscious brain and performing it became a subconscious activity rather than a conscious one. Once it was learnt this way, it could much better be relied on in performance and other things could be learnt that built upon the previous learning.
Principal 1 - Learn a skill at a time, performing it every day for 4 weeks until it is learnt by our subconscious brain. Then build on that by learning other skills, keeping the first skill alive by occasional playing or performing it.

Playing Songs

Playing songs is what I am about here. Classical music is a different world where there is already a well-trodden curriculum for students. Playing songs – with absolutely no knowledge of classical music training – is what I am describing.  It’s the essential folk music of the world, whether that be pop, rock, country, blues, straight-ahead jazz, sambas, salsas, folk, celtic, fusion, funk, reggae, whatever. Even though these rhythms are different and there are differences in customs on playing these tunes, they are all essentially a very similar endeavour – to learn the tune and then perform it, either alone, with friends or to others. I sometimes think of this as ‘folk’ music – music of the people, regardless of the rhythms being used. So, from now on, if I use the term, “folk music” I mean “playing songs, in any of these rhythms, alone, with friends or to others”

Principal 2 - Play Songs.  This means learning songs.  Learning all sorts of things about the songs we are playing, until we know the song completely.
Playing  music is not primarily a knowledge discipline but rather a performance discipline.
What I mean by that is what needs to be trained primarily is the ability to perform something, like we perform a gear-shift or a golf-swing or eating with chop-sticks.  It is possible that someone might be able to write a 20-page dissertation on any of those things but not be able to do them because they haven’t ever done them.   Conversely, there are plenty of folks who have never given a 2nd thought to how they do any of those things but do them brilliantly because, necessarily, they perform them every day.  That’s the key. To acquire performance ability you need to simply do it every day for about 10 to 15 minutes.  Take for example if I had never ever tried to eat with chopsticks.  Well, regardless of my then age, if I am put in a situation that I had to, or wanted to, eat every meal with chopsticks.  You know what, I’d learn that skill pretty quickly.  I reckon after a month of using them three times a day, I’d be able to comfortably eat with them. After a couple of years perhaps I’d be as natural as any Asian who had done it all their lives.  And the academic learning required?  Simply watch the other folk eating at the same table ought to be enough.

Let us applying these two principle to learning piano

  1. Break learning piano down into component parts.
  2. Learn each component part by performing (practising) it for 10 to 15 minutes every day for a month.  If you think you have it nailed after 7 days still continue to do it for the remaining 23 days.
  3. After a month that skill ought to be well and truly honed, pretty much for life.
  4. Now build on that skill when choosing the next thing to learn. (and keep performing the ‘learnt’ skill every few days, say every four or five days)

Actual strategies for learning to play the piano

  1. Always make it fun.
  2. Always make it musical.
  3. Learn more than one component at once.  Have a few, say 3 to 5, depending on how much time you want to spend at the piano each day.  The key is that you need to keep doing it for ~ 15 minutes every day, for the ~ 30 days without a break.  So they need to be fairly enjoyable to perform.
  4. Play tunes – or parts of tunes – until you have developed a skill to play an entire tune.

The Value of a Music Teacher

Music teachers can help to identify what you should be working on next. They know how to break the skills down into components.  They understand music and how music is learned as they have been through the process themselves.  However, a classical music teacher may struggle to learn folk music because they don’t really have a feeling for it.  Some things are constant throughout all genres of music; somethings aren’t.
A music teacher can hear issues that one might not hear oneself, even if you are recording yourself and later listening to the recording – which is a recommended practice.

Music Teachers Considered Harmful?

Other than that, I actually don’t believe that music teachers are worth spending that much time with.  That might be heresy to some.  I certainly think that my time with music teachers has been enjoyable and challenging but also there have been times when I have not been ready and getting more challenges from the teacher has been counter productive.   It is a hard question to have an answer for.   What perhaps makes more sense is to try to learn it oneself and then go to a teacher from time to time to have problems identified.  Few teacher though are willing to be engaged in this way.  They generally prefer regular appointments.  The key information one needs is “How to Learn Music” and “How to Learn the Musical Instrument” (piano and keyboards in your case).  That information is available in books and now on YouTube.

An actual training schedule for learning to play music

  1. Get comfortable with your instrument.  Learn how it works and how best to hold it or sit at it.
  2. Learn one or two tunes so well that you can play them from beginning to end without sheet music in front of you.
  3. Choose a tune, or two, that you really, really like.  Teachers should help choose something that is not too difficult for your ability level, or alternatively, simplifies the tune so that it is within your ability level.
  4. Learn the tune inside-out, back-to-front, and every-which-way.   Well, actually, not from end-to-beginning. The idea is that when learning to play music, it being an aural performance experience/discipline, we always tend to learn it in an aural-context, including, how it sounds in our room, on our instrument, at a certain tempo, with that backing music, etc. etc.  And as soon as one of those things change, the change can throw us a bit, so by learning this one tune in many different ways we really internalise the tune and can then play it in any circumstances.  This is part of musicianship.
    1. Play, just the melody line,
    2. Play, just the chords,
    3. Play, just the baseline,
    4. Play the melody and the baseline together
    5. Play the melody and the chords together
    6. Play the chords and the baseline together
    7. Play a few more involved (developed) baselines
    8. Play each of these at incredibly slow tempos (this really works)
    9. Play each of these at a faster tempo than you would ordinarily want to play this tune.
    10. Play with a backing track
    11. Play over the top of your favourite artist playing this tune.
    12. Play with a rhythm track – a song rhythm track.
    13. Improvise a melody over the chords
    14. Improvise another totally different melody over the chords
    15. Transpose the tune into another key and do each of these again
    16. That’s a huge list.  It’s great if you can do all of them.  If you only play the tune one way you’ll miss out on learning the tune inside-out.  Doing this may seem worthless once you can already play the tune the way you want to but it truly is worthwhile for developing your skills.  Indeed, it is the most worthwhile way I know to develop those musicianship skills.  More worthwhile than learning scales or playing a tune in every key etc.
  5. Break your tune down into sections (they are marked with a || in sheet music), then into phrases.  Learn a phrase at a time, so that you can they walk up to your instrument and play that phrase without having the sheet music in front of you.
  6. Focus on weaknesses when practising.  When learning a piece don’t always try to play the tune from beginning to end, as if you were performing it for an audience. Play first the phrases or sections that you know the least, then either play from the top (the beginning) or the phrase you know the 2nd least. Once you know every bit of the tune you can then start playing it all the way through and then also work on an introduction to it and perhaps an ending as well.
  7. Achieve Repertoire:  Once you have a tune “in your repertoire”, enjoying playing it every day, or every few days and start working on a new tune.
If you do this you’ll know those one or two tunes really well, enjoy playing them and should be able to play them in unfamiliar circumstances.  You will be able to jam and gig on those two tunes! Then you can start on your next one or two tunes.  Eventually, you’ll have both (i) a repertoire of tunes you know inside-out and (ii) also be able to have a number – say 5 – tunes on the go at once at differing levels of progress.  The important thing is that some tunes need to be “in your repertoire” where you can play them straight off, and others are being worked on a bit every day until they themselves get into your repertoire as well.  For over a decade, I made the mistake of never sticking with a tune long enough that it became part of my repertoire, so I had no tunes in my repertoire at all. That was a mistake that no teacher corrected, in fact, it was teachers that insisted on getting me to practice new tunes all the time, taking my attention away from tunes I’d previously started to learn. Yet, achieving a repertoire is absolutely fundamental to progressing as a musician.
8. One more thing. Playing a tune over and over can get a little boring, particularly if you are not playing it that well, but if you use Song Rhythm Tracks when you practice and play the tunes it is so much more enjoyable that you’ll have no problems playing it every day. Also, playing along to a Song Rhythm Track will encourage you to improvise, yet stay within the musical form of the piece.  This is how you take a song further and further – you not only know the song but also how you improvise over it.  That entrenches that song deeper and deeper into your physiology so you never forget it and can even enjoy playing it with other musicians.  That’s the wonder of Jazz.
 
Cheers Matt