I'm tired of sitting around staring at the screen so I decided I wanted to learn piano and started researching it and everyone across the board essentially said self-taught piano is a meme and you need a teacher, and while I can bear the cost of a cheap weighted 88 key piano there's no way I can afford an actual teacher. What are good skills to learn in my spare time so I'm not a complete mental bot of a person?
>everyone across the board essentially said self-taught piano is a meme and you need a teacher
This is absolutely false. I have learned the basics of piano during COVID lockdown and I can now improvise with a keyboard during jam sessions without too many issues.
Of course my technique isn't terribly good, I'm not a "real pianist".
I will never be able to play a Liszt concerto. I will always feel insecure and self-depreciate in front of someone who formally learned to play piano with proper technique at a music school. I tend to improvise too much in the major keys of D or G because they are the ones I'm the most comfortable with. My left and right hands aren't completely independent from each other.
But it only took me a month or two to be able to play the first twelve bars of Chopin's Prelude No. 4. And more importantly, it's fun, and learning to play piano allows you to apply the basics of harmony and keyboard technique to other instruments like synthesizers, which can be very useful when making electronic music in a DAW for example.
My main problem is that I don't practice, in part because my 88-key MIDI keyboard is busted, but mostly because I'm lazy.
The first instrument I've learned is guitar 20 years ago, and I still can't play moderately complex classical pieces or any hard song by Elliott Smith/Judee Sill/John Fahey.
It's okay, I play slow, but I can still play. I made peace with this years ago. It's better to have limited technique than no technique and no knowledge at all .
There is a ton of Youtube videos on how to learn piano. We don't even have to learn how to read sheet music in order to learn songs nowadays, we are insanely lucky on that front.
I recommend this video to quickly learn how to have a better finger position, this channel is pretty cool, this girl is a rather unpretentious classical pianist.
Keep playing and don't listen to the gatekeepers.
>>706920It's like saying it's useless to play a video game like Celeste because you will never be one of the top speedrunners of the game.
Or that it's useless to learn painting because you will never be as good as Van Gogh or Vermeer.
Or that it's useless to go fishing because you will never catch a fish as big as the world's record.
Or that it's useless to learn Marxist theory because you will never be the next Lenin or Adorno.
Or that it's useless to learn programming because you never be as smart as Donald Knuth.
You don't have to be the best at something to enjoy it, have fun with it, or for it to make you a more well-rounded and knowledgeable person.
Not many people can perfectly play a Liszt concerto, and the ones who can are famous precisely because they can. Do you think everyone who has a piano at their home are training everyday with a teacher since they were 2 years old? No, most of them play relatively simple pieces like Moonlight Sonata to have fun, not to showoff.
This attitude of "you will never be perfect at X therefore give up before you ever tried" is just encouraging people to live a mediocre life consisting of doomscrolling and passively consuming media.
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