I want to learn piano

OK fine Craigslist or Kijiji
I'm just saying

Classical pieces and correct performance. I'm a perfectionist

You have no other option then. Get a teacher and risk giving up in a month or having all the joy sucked out of piano playing (although this is more of a tossup than that other guy was suggesting)

OP here, my ultimate goal is to play improv jazz piano. Anywhere i should aim toward ?

read the fucking book i sent retard

Not OP but I got a question. Is it okay to get a 61 key keyboard for a beginner?

Ive been playing for 2.5 years and this and volume 2 and 3 are great.

How do I find a teacher that knows what they're doing and isn't a con artist? I've read so many horror stories of people wasting money on bad teachers.

The music selection is terrible though.

I’ve been playing piano for almost 20 years. What I can tell you is, you won’t be fast or precise enough to play that piece you linked without learning and practicing exercises and scales. Learning to read music alone to that level of proficiency will take years. If you want to learn it by ear that’s another story, but again without a foundation based in theory or savantism you’re going to have to grit your teeth and start at the beginning.

Answer this for me?

Check out the reddit for piano practice, they’ve gathered some good stuff.

It’s a long journey, so I don’t know where to start really. But I will say some important pointers.

1. It is a complex skill. Treat it as such. You can spend some time isolating aspects, such as playing scales, but it is NOT the meat of the practice. Ie. watch out for doing low effort drills that seem like practice, but which might have very little transfer to actually dealing with music.

2. Technique wise you are looking for a sense of lightness, effortlessness and lack of tension. There has to be some tension in the finger muscle to press down the key, but the shoulders, wrist and the rest of the hand should be relaxed, and there should never be a build-up of tension - not as you go faster either. Generally you play with arm weight and wrist rotations, that is you use the bigger muscles when you can. Really fast stuff tends to be more the smaller muscles cause they move faster.

3. Learn from actually great pianists. You can study how they move and sound. You won’t understand it immediately, just keep trying to understand why they move like they do. To sound and look effortless it has to also feel effortless.

4. You can get a piece from 0-95% in the same time as you get from 95-100%. You will learn much more in every way by choosing appropriately easy pieces but learning a lot of them. Polish the ones you really like, and the others you just work until you reach the sweet spot of learning outcomes per effort.

5. Memorize the scores and copy them from memory. You will get a sense of composition and a deep insight into the piece from doing this. It will also help you learn to both read and write music. This is how bach taught composition. Reading isn’t hard but it moves very slowly to begin with. Just memorize a bar or two per day.

Melodics is a good tool

6. When practicing a piece, start by listening to other performances of it. See if you can form a vision for how you want it to sound. You can follow your memorization progress, learning a new bar or two on the piano per day. Practice with a metronome! And practice as slowly as you need to, to make no mistakes. And practice the musical intention at all times.

Ok that’s it for now, good luck!

If they can’t do, don’t trust them to teach you how to do. You need one that is a good player, and who is interested in finding out who you are gonna be, rather than make you into what they hoped to be. Chemistry matters - you’re gonna have to explore a little. Teachers can understand that

What do you want? Classical performance, you should get a full size, and one with good weighted keys... Although you should really get an acoustic in my honest opinion. A used yamaha u1 for example. I regret buying digital even as a beginner, cause it’s just not the same (yamaha p-105 iirc)

Check this out m.youtube.com/watch?v=N2yMQREAFkM

In my opinion for improv you need to develop a good ear. Lots of transcription. You need some theory too, but ingest it as you find the need for it.

Basically learn the basic song, then learn it in all 12 keys... Might seem redundant, but you’ll get familiar with each key that way. Then you can start making the harmony more interesting, or developing the melody.

Whenever you happen upon something cool, just see if you can work it out by ear, and then play that a bit. Not for the sake of repeating it verbatim in your improv, but whatever you practice, that’s kind of the substance your inner creative source will sing things made out of.

Honestly, 61 keys is perfect for a beginner :) it will contain most of the notes used in conventional music. The importance is weighted keys. Make sure if you’re getting an electric keyboard that the keys respond to pressure. A lot of shitty keyboards don’t discriminate between soft touches and hammering the keys, and the note will always be at its loudest. Also ensure if the keyboard doesn’t come with a sustain pedal that you buy at least a cheap one. Sustaining notes allows you to transition from one to the next without breaking the mood of the song or piece.

Agree with sustain. I don’t really agree with 61 keys, just because I believe it’s important to become familiar with something that resembles the real thing as much as possible. + how shit does it feel when you do need the notes and you have to go “oh yeah, I don’t have those :-(“

This is a good point, but I feel it would be more relevant if OP is playing around with octave leaps or very grand-sounding pieces. I would say that having 88 keys is great for exploring, or getting used to the layout of the keys, it isn't essential for learning basic scales. I figure at the start OP will be exploring chord progressions and some very basic stuff, and splashing out on a full sized keyboard is going to be more expensive. Also, a small keyboard is excellent for learning the significance of chord inversions. If you don't have the notes, and need to create the illusion of ascension, inversion is the way to go imho

I'd also add that if OP wanted to compromise between size and price, I use a 76-key keyboard. I've played with a few bands over the years and it's never let me down. It's small enough that I can drag it to a show, but also big enough to have sufficient notes to fuck around with

>cute boys.

hey there :)