I’m trying to teach myself piano about 30 years after abandoning my childhood lessons. You can find the roundup with links to what is and isn’t working so far here: Learning Piano in Middle Age: Roundup
You can find the previous week post here: Week 2.
It’s Been a While…
OK, so as I’d worried, I haven’t really been able to keep up the rhythm of weekly roundups. That’s OK though, my priority is practicing and learning, and these writeups unfortunately take a backseat.
The good news is that I’ve managed to keep up the habit for about 3 months now! With a few exceptions (around travel or houseguests), I’ve managed to stick to my goal of practicing at least 15 minutes every single day. Many days, I only get to it as the last thing before bed, and I push through it, watching the clock. On better days I get more into it, especially when I’m struggling with a tricky piece, and go 30–75 minutes.
How much progress have I made? Well, I’m starting to feel comfortable with basic I-IV- V7 chords, and playing two-handed in the first few major and minor keys. I still haven’t spent all that much time on the black keys, though.
Software
After trying a few other programs, I’m still mostly using Piano Marvel on my Mac as my go-to practice app. I like that it shows a relatively normal sheet music view, and it does a good job of giving bite-sized challenges that fit with my 15-minute sessions. It also has much less ceremony than other apps—just the sheet music, a rating out of 100 with a view of flubbed notes, and (as I’ve gotten further) optional YouTube videos that walk you through each piece. It fits my study style and temperament, and I’m planning to stick with it.
In the past couple of months, I also tried out Skoove and Yousician.
Skoove
I had a free 3-month subscription with my keyboard, but I bounced off of it pretty much immediately. I don’t even remember it that well, I think it wasn’t very good at giving specific feedback about which notes I got wrong—it was very focused on showing synced videos of fingers playing the keys.
Yousician
Yousician was much more interesting—it’s very clearly patterned after the Guitar Hero/Rock Band style games, with slick graphics, a progression tree, and even stopping the song if you’re doing too badly. The music is well-produced, often with vocals, and I got some of the songs stuck in my head.
The biggest problem is that it really wants to use Rock Band-style colors for notation:
I want to develop my sight reading skills, so I really prefer normal notation. It’s possible to change it (though it doesn’t always remember the setting):
Even with normal notation, I didn’t really like the continuously scrolling, giant notes approach—after watching the notes scroll by on my 15" laptop screen for a few songs, I would feel a bit dizzy. I get why they do it, because it would work really well on a phone screen, but I much prefer reading across at least a couple staves like I do in Piano Marvel.
The final strike against Yousician is that it seems to lock you into a gym-style yearly membership, which feels shady (especially with only a week’s free trial).
MuseScore
MuseScore is both a site where you can find sheet music, and an accompanying open-source desktop app for editing and playing scores.
I’ve enjoyed using the desktop app for viewing scores, and it also conveniently has a decent set of MIDI instruments with it, so I can use it for generating sounds while I’m practicing. One of my pet projects has been trying to play the intense solo violin arpeggios from Max Richter’s November as a piano part:
I wasn’t sure it would be physically possible given that it was written for a different instrument, but after some experimentation I’ve managed the first few bars, so I’m planning to keep chipping away at it.
So Long
So that’s how things have been going. From here I’ll probably only post when I have significant progress or find interesting software, but I any welcome questions from other aspiring keyboardists!
