Learning adult piano: goals, time and repertoire

Your benefits as an adult versus piano

It's common to think that children learn piano better. Actually, they learn different. The adult has letters that play for them:

• Understanding: Do you understand why a chord sounds cheerful or sad, how a scale will be built and how a piece will shape. That accelerates reading and memory.
• Retirement of his own: No one's forcing you to go to class, and you're there because you want to.
• Musical criterion: You know what music you love and you can choose your way.
• Organization: you can plan your practice, conduct a record and measure your advance.

The most common disadvantage isn't with his fingers but with his head: an adult's usually very autocritical and frustrates his or her face when his or her face doesn't sound as if his or her face's been broken. To accept that you're going to play with a few mistakes for a while is part of the process, and that's not a sign that you're bad for this.

Realist targets: What do you want to play

Before the first class, think about what you figure with piano. Each goal calls for a different approach and put it clearly allows the teacher to put a plan to your care:

Do not have to choose a single: many adults combine reading and chords. The important thing is that the goal will inspire you. If you want an idea of the stage of the path, check how long it takes to learn piano.

How long you need a week

Most adults advance well with 15 to 30 minutes of practice five or 6 days a week as well as class. The secret isn't quantity but frequency: their fingers better consolidate what you repeat following.

• Keep the piano ready: Open cover, bench at your place and score at atril. If we have to enlist everything, you don't practice.
• He's leading his practice to something you're already doing: before breakfast, after work or after lunch.
• Divide long days: Ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the night also work.
• Use the methonomal from the start: slow and constant wins at fast and irregular. Can use our [online metronomer]](/herramientas/metronomo).
• Practice with hearing aids if you have a digital piano and complicated schedule with your neighbours.

The heavy weeks are about to come, and in those, play five minutes what you know keeps his habit alive till his calm's back.

Repertoire that motivates an adult

What holds an adult most at piano is to play music that he likes. These are ideas that teachers often use, most often in versions adapted to the level:

Classes accessible

• The Sunshine Minute of Anne Magdalena Bach's notebook, attributed to Christian Petzold.
• A simplified version of For Elisa, Beethoven.
• Satie's Gymnopédie nº 1, slow and very grateful to work the sound.
• Pieces of the albums for the youth of Schumann or Chaikovski, when you have been reading with flares.

Songs and popular music

• Baladas and pop songs with four chords.
• Boleros and music from the time that sounded at your place, in simple arrangements.
• Colombian pails and bambucos adapted to piano.
• A theme for films and music for contemporary piano, that usually love beginners.

Tell your teacher what you listen to at your day after day. Part of his job is to find or write a version that you can play now, not in years.

What piano you need to get started with

A digital piano with 88 matching keys, touch sensitivities and maintenance pedal are good enough for the first few years and has benefits in an apartment: volume monitoring, hearing aids and zero tuning. A 61-key without weight keyboard serves to get first steps with chords but soon remains short if you want to play classical pieces.

At the right height, forearms are almost parallel to the ground and relaxed shoulders, and an overly low dining chair is a common source of tension. We explain this to you in detail how to choose your first piano or keyboard.

Typical mistakes of the adult that starts

• To play the whole piece from the first day rather than work with fragments.
• Skip his technique because it looks boring and then hit with passages that don't come out.
• Learn only with videos with lights and with no reading and no understanding.
• Touch with his shoulders up, his wrist down or his fingers flat.
• To be compared with social networking piologists that have been playing for decades.
• To leave the piano at first Plateau, just before a leap.

The posture deserves special attention, because the habits of the first months stay. Check [the right place of his hands at piano]](/blog/posicion-correcta-de-las-manos-en-el-piano) and ask your teacher to correct her from the beginning.

Frequently asked questions