Teaching yourself to play piano can be very effective and enjoyable, if you know what you’re doing. I spent many years as a self-taught pianist, and continue to grow and improve without a teacher. The following methods are ones that I use regularly and recommend to my students.
If you’re still deciding on whether you should teach yourself or take piano lessons, I recommend checking out my article ‘Are Piano Lessons Worth It? [7 Questions to Ask Yourself]‘.
1. Watch YouTube Tutorials
There’s a lot of high quality tutorials on YouTube (and other online resources) that are really helpful. Do some basic searches and try a few different teachers. You may find that one option may fit your style the best, or be teaching the content that you were hoping to learn. There’s other resources like SkillShare and Udemy that have really good content – try that out as well if you’re willing to pay a small sum.
This is a great alternative to getting in person lessons because it’s either free or very cheap, and you get your pick from a wide variety of teachers. If you don’t like one, great – you’re one click away from the next. Also, you can specifically search for any questions you might have. For example, if you want to learn how to play a specific song, there may be a full tutorial targeting that song, containing exactly what you need.
Personally, I’ve learned some really great stuff from a few channels. Some of my favorites: JeffSchneider and PrettySimpleMusic teach some solid neo-soul and R&B chord progressions, OpenStudio covers several topics surrounding modern jazz piano, and Michael Lucke posts a lot of improvised solo transcriptions. These examples are a little more advanced, but you’ll find a ton of resources at beginner levels as well.
2. Learn Your Chords
It can be a little tricky mastering all the commonly used chords, but hugely worth it. This is because you can’t avoid them – pretty much every song you know will be based on these chords. If you’re already familiar with major and minor, in all twelve keys, you’ll be able to blast through any new song you learn. Instead of having to painstakingly go note by note through the song, the notes you need to play will already make sense to you.
Usually from what I’ve seen in students, this step can take a while. Multiplying the two main chord types (major and minor) with the number of keys (12), there’s 24 different chords to memorize. If you want to get more advanced, there’s also dominant chords, diminished chords, and augmented chords. Although the payoff of knowing all the different combinations is huge, it’s just really hard to stay motivated while getting them under your fingers.
I personally recommend learning in chunks, and learning the chords that are most relevant to your situation. For example, look up your favorite song’s chords on google, write down the first four or five chords, and focus on those. When you come back to learn the song, it’ll happen much faster.
The students I’ve had can attest that I really try to force the issue on them learning their chords. The payoff is massive – a piano or keyboard that has a solid command of all the different chords can play any genre, in any band, with minimal preparation. I can show up to gigs without even rehearsing and play along, just because I’m very comfortable with typical chords and chord progressions.
3. Master Basic Music Theory
This includes chords, but also a lot of other terminology and concepts that will come in handy. You’ll want to know what beats, measures, and rhythms are because it will help you play notes at the right times. If you’re playing with other musicians, there will be all sorts of lingo that you might hear like ‘what key are we playing in’ and ‘go to the bridge’. Simple google searches should help you solve those problems. When it comes to the most basic and practical music theory, you should be able to get what you need from the internet.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also emphasize learning your scales. Knowing your scales won’t directly help you play songs, but it’s a necessary evil for being comfortable with music theory. It will allow you to do is anticipate other chords in a song. If the song is in the key of C, then the other chords in the song will likely start on notes in the C major scale. In jazz there’s a lot more crazy chords, but in most pop songs this rule is followed.
Scales will also help you if you want to learn to improvise. Improvisation is essential if you’re playing jazz, but can often come up in other genres of music as well and is just called a ‘solo’. Any advanced improviser has a really solid grasp of all scales, and which scales correspond to which chords. Although good solos don’t use scales as ‘rules’ to determine the notes to play, they usually use them as guidelines.
4. Define What You Want to Learn
Goals setting is especially important if you’re teaching yourself. With a piano teacher, you’ll have someone to fall back on if you’re getting off track or losing motivation. On your own, you’ll want to be very clear with yourself about what you want to achieve and keep it in mind when you’re practicing. This will help you avoid any disappointment or feeling that you’re not making progress.
When setting your goals, be careful about the standards you’re holding yourself to. The most important thing for your goals is that you really would enjoy the work you’ll need to put in. Don’t choose music because it will impress others, or because your favorite YouTuber is putting out tutorials for it. Figure out what you connect with, and pursue only that.
Also, you can always change and modify your plan as needed. If you’ve set the bar too high for yourself, don’t be afraid to relax a little bit. There’s no need to put unnecessary pressure on yourself to practice more than you want to. The process should be fun, and there’s nothing wrong with only practicing a couple minutes a day.
This is one of the things I struggle with a lot – too often I sit down at the piano and just mess around, rather than work towards something. Sometimes I wonder how much better I’d be if I spent those hours focusing on improving my skills… but at the same time I really enjoy messing around. Striking the right balance is important, because the most important thing is to enjoy playing, no matter how many of your goals you achieve.
Some examples of things I set as goals are learning new popular or trending songs, putting together set lists for shows, transcribing jazz solos, transposing material into new keys, cleaning up my mechanics, improving my time by playing with a metronome, or arranging my ideas. These are common goals for a lot of piano players – you can use some of these ideas if you’re looking for inspiration.
5. Try to Learn Your Favorite Songs
I say this several times in this blog – this is a great way to improve your skills and enjoy yourself! You don’t have to learn the usual songs that everyone plays on the piano. Go to your favorite Spotify playlist, pick some songs you’re constantly listening to, Google the chords, and learn it! Not only is this the best way to enjoy yourself, but knowing how to play basic songs is a very practical skill.
You can really play any genre of music with this method. Some will be harder than others – for example, Rap and EDM often don’t really have clear chords to play. In this cases, just do your best and get creative. You can at least learn the melodies and the bass lines. This is also a good way to impress your friends, especially if you can play their favorite songs as well.
If you’re learning piano by yourself, you may not have as much encouragement to stick with it, so it’s important to really focus on what you enjoy the most. I recommend making this a regular part of your practice routine because it’s probably the most fun thing you can do.
6. Mimic Other Piano Players and Play By Ear
This is a concept that very established in jazz circles, and I’m a huge proponent of all musicians doing this. Copying what good players are doing is the fastest way to get good. It’s not cheating, and it’s not dishonest – no-one owns the notes on a piano.
One analogy I like to use is that copying good musicians to learn music is the same as copying others when learning English. We learn language by listening a lot, and copying words and phrases. Eventually we combine words and phrases in unique ways, but at the start it’s just mimicry. It’s widely accepted that we are all allowed to use the same words and phrases, and the same rules apply to music.
If you like certain chord progressions or a certain lick that you heard, go learn it! The process of taking notes from a recording and learning them is called transcribing, and is very difficult when first starting out. You’ll likely have to listen to the passage many times before ‘hearing’ the notes enough to play them.
You can do this for any song, any genre of music, and you can even learn passages from musicians on other instruments. For me, this is probably the most common way I learn new music and improve my skills. If I hear something I like in my day to day life, I write it down and go to YouTube or Spotify that night to play it over and over and learn it.
One trick I really like to do is go to Youtube and use the slow down feature. If you click on settings and playback speed (see images below), you can slow down the video as low as .25x, giving you much more time to internalize every note and figure out where it is on the keyboard.
7. Get Feedback When You Can
Just because you’re teaching yourself doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally get a second pair of ears. If you have the funds, I highly recommend taking an occasional lesson to gut check what you’re doing. In just one lesson, you may come away with an idea that informs your practicing for years to come! What’s cool about this method is that both you and your teacher will really focus on what’s important when you both know there’s not much time.
I haven’t had a regular teacher for six years now, but once or twice a year I take a lesson with an old teacher or professional musician in LA. Another time, a keyboard player I follow on Instagram was offering Zoom lessons and I took one from him. I still remember the main takeaway from each of those lessons years later, which is well worth the price of just one lesson.
You can also post your playing on social media, show your friends and family, or try to play gigs and shows. Although those audiences are less educated in music, they still have opinions that you can learn from. You can ask them what they think, or even just observe their reactions. When I play gigs, I’m constantly scanning the room to see if people are paying attention or enjoying the song. Over a long period of time, you can gain a sense of what works and what doesn’t.
8. Find Ways to Motivate Yourself
Learning to play piano or keyboard can be a tough journey, and there will times you’re over it. Look for ways you can keep yourself accountable and establish forward momentum. For example, try to set a goal to learn certain songs, or set a goal to play in a band for a live audience. Even better, if you tell your friends that you’re learning the song or book a show, now other people expect you deliver. The pressure will likely get you where you need to be, and you get to reap the benefits of seeing your progress!
Overall, turning piano into a legitimate hobby for yourself is the absolute best way to stay motivated. You don’t want to learn to play piano, but become a pianist. If playing music is engrained in your lifestyle and your social circles, it’s very unlikely you’ll quit. Speaking from my experience, playing piano is so engrained in me that no amount of challenges or difficulties in the learning process could make me give up.
Turning piano into a hobby like this isn’t easy – check out this article for a list of action items I use to do it.
9. Pace Yourself and Don’t Give Up
If you’re not feeling it some days, then take a break! There can be a certain attitude towards practice that makes people feel like they need to put in hours every day without rest. This is harmful, and almost always results in burnout. Playing piano is supposed to be fun. Practice when you feel motivated, and let it rest if you don’t.
There’s a story I really like of Miles Davis, the great jazz trumpet player, who basically stopped wanting to play music for a while. He dipped out of the scene, and dealt with his own unrelated personal problems for five years. Of course, he came back with a fresh sound and continued being a legend. This is probably the most extreme example I’ve heard of, but the moral of the story rings true – step away if you need to. Forcing yourself to practice and play is the quickest way to develop a negative relationship with the instrument.
That being said, you should apply a little bit of pressure on yourself to improve. If you’ve stopped practicing for more than a couple days, then I’d force yourself to get back on the bench, even if it’s only a few minutes. Give yourself opportunities to get back on track when you can. Other than that, just listen to your gut and trust yourself. Take ownership of the process and design it to make you the happiest.