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Learn To Play The Piano

It is reported that 80% of adults wish they had learned to play the piano.

What about the 20% who actually try to learn the piano?

It’s my experience that about 50% of adults who try to learn piano quit after several months. But they do not quit for the same reasons that children do.

Children do well at the routine of piano lessons largely because of the regularity of the lessons. Just being present for a good teacher’s session will begin to interest even an apathetic child.

Thus children tend to learn piano because Mom says they have to have a lesson once a week, and makes sure that the lesson is taken if for no other reason than that she is paying for it.

Adults are more in control of their own lives, and thus events may preclude lessons, just like with children. So adults miss lessons because of dental appointments, just like children.

But there is a difference. When the going gets tough with the piano, children have no choice but to continue, because Mom says you have to. But an adult can simply say, “I don’t want to do this,” and is immediately released from “duty” without question.

In my experience, it is the adults who are persistent and weather the difficult times who succeed at learning the piano.

Here’s an example. I teach a 55 year old bulldozer salesman with huge, fat hands and thick fingers. That’s another way of saying he’s an unlikely candidate for Carnegie Hall.

But he practices, slowly, carefully, absolutely every day, not because I tell him, but because he is consumed with a desire to learn the piano.

His progress was so slow that he could almost not see it. I have taught him five years. Only in the last year has he been able to play pieces of moderate difficulty (The Entertainer, As Time Goes By) with speed and even a smoothness. He enjoys playing more and more, probably because he may be the most patient man I have ever met.

He is now making music at the piano because he waited five long years to learn it from the ground up. His current progress is exponential, because like all pianists he now sees the underlying patterns and the similarity of musical vocabulary from one piece to the next.

At the piano, patient students are rewarded.

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