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Whether you’ve always dreamed of learning to play the piano or you’ve already moved beyond the beginner stage, Pianochord.org helps you grow and enjoy real progress.
Many people think it’s harder than it really is to learn to play the piano. That is not to say it's easy, but the important thing is to begin and establish a daily practice routine. It’s also important to find a part of the day in which your piano playing isn’t sacrificed for other things.
There’s no single right way to begin: you might prefer to try out some easy songs, play simple exercises, explore scales or learn a few chords. The best part? You don’t have to choose – you can to combine all parts for a fun and varied approach that keeps you motivated.
Piano Newcomer
Start with your first steps on the piano if you are a beginner.
Piano Essentials
Learn everything from piano keys and notes to chords and scales.
Piano chord progressions
Play and understand chord progressions ›
Learn how chord progressions are built and try to play various chord sequences.
Classical music
Learn from the classic music repertoire ›
Learn to play classical piano pieces with interactive piano and notes.
Learning piano is not easy
People who tell you that learning piano is easy are often trying to sell a book or a course. The word “easy” is part of the sales pitch, but the truth is that learning to play the piano is not easy.
This isn’t said to discourage you, but to give you a realistic perspective. Some effort is needed to see results. But it’s absolutely worth it. And you don’t have to be a pro to enjoy yourself at the piano.
Just remember that it takes time to develop coordination, sight-reading, muscle memory, musical ear and theoretical knowledge – to mention just a few of the important areas for a pianist.
It will come. As long as you have patience, you’ll notice steady improvement.
How to get better?
Obviously, you improve by playing. But progress is often slow. Discouragement can set in: you may feel that you will never reach the level you aspire to. What matters is playing things that are difficult, rather than sticking to what is easy and already mastered. Repetition shouldn’t be dismissed, but what you already know well doesn’t need much “maintenance.”
The key is to repeat until you’ve learned something new. After that, some continued practice can be useful to consolidate what you’ve learned, but at this stage you should mainly focus on conquering new territory. You must be willing to approach what is difficult in order to expand your ability.
Most of us have a natural resistance to difficult things. We prefer when there isn’t too much friction, and as a result we often avoid challenges. If you play only occasionally, this becomes even more noticeable: you make little progress, and when you reach a difficult passage – for example, a piece you can only stumble through – you feel a strong reluctance. This is why you regularly should tackle the hard parts.
By doing this fairly frequently, the difficult sections will transform and after a while no longer feel as overwhelming. It takes extra effort, but the reward will come, and you will appreciate the feeling when you realize that you starting to play things that once seemed nearly impossible.
This does not mean you should take on the most difficult pieces you can find, that will probably wreck your motivation very fast. You should stay right at the edge of your ability and continually give yourself tasks that are one step above where you currently are. It’s like climbing a ladder – one step at a time. And when you eventually look down, you may be surprised by how many steps you’ve climbed.
So how much time is needed? This is a common question. Hopefully, you don’t care very much about the answer – you have already decided to play a lot. But to give same answers. A professional may play 4-6 hours a day. That is of course not something even an ambitious hobby player will do, but to reach result you should try to play a session every day, at least most of the days. There is typical to proclaim how easy it is to learn piano and that you only need to play ten minutes a day or. This is typical way to “sell” something, an instruction book or a method, that is a “saviour” on your tough journey to master an instrument. Ten minutes will not be enough to make you play in a way that will impress your friends. As already stated, learning piano is not easy. Regardless of the method, you need at least 3-4 hours a week, to make some real progress.
It can be worth to put some time to learning an instrument. By doing creative things you get a rest from an often stressful life, typical for many in the modern world. Concentrating on the piano playing will force you to lay other things aside and move away from all kinds of distractions that doesn't really lead somewhere. Studies show that playing music, among many other things, improve memory and ease stress.
The method and its purposes
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Have you ever felt frustrated when you just can’t make your piano sound the way you want? Or confused about how to make chords sound as beautiful as you hoped? As long as you depend on sheet music, you’re following instructions from paper. That slows you down. You have to decode the information before you can play it on your instrument. In other words, you’re both reading and playing instead for just playing. And it's not really you that is playing, which can make the output from your hands inept. Strangely enough, it can actually be easier to play partly by yourself than to follow instructions.
Of course, it’s crucial to get help in the beginning. The purpose of many of these tools is to give you input that you can incorporate in seconds – and, over time, become partly and eventually completely independent from.
If you rely only on sheet music, you’ll need to master sight-reading to play freely – and that can take years, even decades.
A more attractive and effective approach is to as quickly as possible start "playing by yourself" – using chords, scales and other concepts. These are tools that let you improve your playing without depending so much on outside instructions.
Still, you might notice you’re doing two things: looking at the screen (for example, at a chord progression) while trying to play it. So how do you get down to one thing? You have two main options. One is to memorize the chord progressions. But that is not always easy and the more complex things you learn, the harder it will become to keep everything in your memory. The second option is – and this is fundamental – to avoid looking at the keyboard.
Not looking at the keyboard is fundamental, not only because it lets you keep your eyes elsewhere (like on the progression you’re following), but because piano is played with two hands. If you can play chords with your left hand without looking, you can focus fully on the melody your right hand is playing.
It’s not as hard as you might think. Your muscle memory will quickly develop and cover more and more chords. You should gradually stop watching your left hand. You will make mistakes, but you must accept that since this is the only way to eventually become able with accuracy without looking.
When you can play a few triads with your left hand without looking, you’ve reached the next level. Using inversions helps you get there much faster. The economy of movement they provide is a huge advantage: instead of jumping four white keys to the right from C major to G major, you need only jump one if you go from C to G/B or G/D (especially from C to G/B – your hand barely moves, just your fingers).
No video lessons?
Watching great players can be inspiring. But it can also work in the wrong direction: you will often compare yourself with the person performing on the video – and lose in the comparison. You will think of yourself as worse than you are because you compare with someone who masters something seemingly effortlessly, when you experience a lot of problems doing the same things.
That’s unfair to yourself. You forgot that the person you’re watching has probably practiced for hours a day, for many years – thousands, maybe ten thousand hours. It’s not a fair comparison, but it’s hard not to make it.
Even if you know this logically, the psychological effect can still kick in. Watching someone who plays effortlessly can shift your standard upward in an unrealistic way. And when that happens, it’s harder to appreciate your own progress. You stop valuing what you have achieved, and that can actually decrease your motivation instead of fueling it.
With that said, we haven’t touched the main issue of video lessons. The time spent (and to some extent lost) watching someone other play instead for playing by yourself will in the long run be massive.