Final thoughts – learning piano

Over the term, I’ve been dedicating time to learning my chosen piece. When I first choose this goal, I figured I would be able to learn the entire piece with relative ease. Now at the end of term, it has become clear that my original goal was very ambitious. The song itself is about 2:50, and now at the end I was able to learn the first 30 seconds of it.

While this is much less than I originally thought I’d be able to get accomplished, I am still proud of what I’ve done and I’ve been able to identify why I wasn’t able to learn more of the song. As I mentioned in a previous post, my experimental technique to this learning journey was to first identify what each note was, pencil it in on my sheet music, then learn the song through memorization. As someone with little to no prior experience with piano, this seemed like the most reasonable way to learn a piece from scratch. Looking back, my progress would have been exponentially greater if I were able to simply read the music and begin memorization.

If I were to learn an entirely new piece now, I would actually start by first teaching myself to read the sheet music much faster, as this was my biggest obstacle. I kept finding myself getting lost, forgetting where I was in the music, and would have to completely stop, find the next note, but then forgetting the sequence entirely. In the future I would actually practice identifying the notes from flash cards first, confidently be able to instantly identify all notes on the staffs, and then begin learning a piece.

I will continue to learn piano as I very much enjoy it, and know this is a skill that will carry through the entirety of ones life. The next steps for me is to be completely confident reading music, and go from there.