Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum How do you learn piano online?

Hi guys,
My tech education startup is developing an app to help adult beginners learn a song faster without stressing over music theories.

If you are an adult beginner, what online platform is working for you and why? As we are improving the product experience, your comments would help us a lot in creating a good app that is actually useful

Thanks and stay safe!
Annie.

Are you the one doing this tech education startup? If so, do you know anything about learning to play the piano, if you are going to teach about it through that system? Do you have a background in piano or in music yourself. Your profile is empty and since this is your first post, there is nothing to go on.

If you are looking to teach "songs", perhaps you might go to site for singers. I would have pointed out Teoria as a good site that I have used from time to time, except that you said something about "stressing" about theory. An excellent online platform has been the one by Jaak Sikk. He begins with solid development of basic movement on the piano, goes on to reading skills, how to work on a piece considering the movement of each hand and the coordination of both, and how to divide up your material effectively. Somehow I don't think you are looking for that kind of input.

Could you start by telling us something about your background, and your ideas?

Just as a tool I use Tascam GB-10 which has a number of features I find very useful for learning a song of any sort.

I imagine as useful in an app.

- easy to program repetition - press Loop once it starts tracking, press Loop again it starts repeating between those two spots
- a button Key transpose in semitones, I assume altering sample rate - so if wanting to play white keys only(key of C), you can do that etc.
- button Speed allow to slow down or speed up as you please. Probably the granular idea a lot of such tools use. Usually sound ok down to x0.7 and lower more severely change in sound. But really helpful in tracing certain notes and keeping up playing along.
- metronome like for practicing
- balance button for hearing you own playing over what is played back
- you can record like sound-on-sound to listen to performance or just own ideas for songs etc. I usually use a dictaphone always withing reach for this, but hey phones are within reach also often.

So you can combine, looping, key change and speed change as you please.

I have not used online tutoring so far, but this guy is giving lessons and looking at his concept there might be opportunities for an app to simplify things. Pupils send in videos and he comments and helps out etc.

http://aw4piano.info/en/info1

App could give business for various tutors that want to be exposed and use app for their pupil services and simplfying things.

Hi @keystring,
Thanks for the comment! Our app is called Piano Time (you can check it out here: https://go.onelink.me/WrwJ/178d765e). I am working in customer development and we have a product development team who are piano instructors & learners of 3-7 years of experience.

Our idea is to help adult learners who just want to learn the songs they like. The app helps guide them through songs by dividing them up so that users can practice each hand movement and the hand coordination for the pieces. Speed change, like @Nip mentioned, is a feature in the app which is to help users control their speed. We don't focus on theory but how to get users to learn a song faster and enjoy the learning process by playing the songs they actually like.

I went through Jaak Sikk Youtube channel. He gives a quite comprehensive series on piano tips for beginners.

Hi @Nip,
Thanks for the good suggestion. Some of them are actually in our development pipeline!

Just a quick check, what do you mean by "easy to program repetition" - does this mean you get the app to repeat a part you are currently practicing? Currently we are dividing up the piece for users, and they can listen to how the piece actually sounds before starting to play.

For "balance button for hearing you own playing over what is played back", you want to see how far off one's playing comparing to the actual piece?

Thanks a lot!

With repeat I just mean loop from any 2 points in material.
- you listen to a song you want to learn, any recording on a mp3 or wav file.
- part comes up where you want to repeat from - press loop once
- continue listen until where you want to repeat to - press loop again
- now this section loops infinitely until pressing loop button again

What says that pupil want to repeat from the points where you have decided, is my thought?
You said you prepare, here is the section you should practise in one go.

Anywhere you find difficult is where you might want to repeat in a loop.

Yes, balance is for play along.

This device I have you can record your performance on as well.

Other example

Stuff I have in gear for learning drums - you have plenty songs in different styles, all midi based - so you can run in any tempo without sounding goofy.
And you listen to the performance with or without drums - as an example.
So just press a button to either listen to prepared drum part with background music and you can play along, or leave out prerecorded drums and only hear your own playing.

If recorded your performance playing along you can listen to your own performance with background later. Hear mistakes clearly etc.

It's nothing like hearing a recording of what you did to reveal mistakes. You might feel you did alright, but facts are facts.

To get ideas I come to think of a game on console I tried some year ago - Rocksmith. It exist for pc, xbox and playstation.

This for guitar then.

So well known recordings were licensed so you have multichannel with guitar separate.

As song is played back, they also have a sliding window with notes to fret to play along. No sheet music - just showing frets and where to press.

Rather cool, I thought.

If you prepare a Rachmaninov piano concerto or similar, to play the piano part yourself. I'm sure there are pretty good pianists out there that would like that.

There is already a mature product available: https://synthesiagame.com/

It is apparently quite popular and there are a lot of youtube videos of songs being played through synthesia that you can learn from, if that is a person's learning style.

If the OP is planning to launch a learning web site, s/he should really do something that has not yet been done and that s/he truly believes would aid the learning process in some unique manner. I have no idea what that would be, since the piano has been around for so long, and so many types of learning products have been developed for it over many, many years already. Another "me too" site would really just unnecessarily clutter an already crowded piano teaching landscape.

Tony

I've looked into that Synthesia, however my opinion is that it is quite a trap for learning piano.

If you rely on synthesia you will not develop or improve your sight reading skills.

I found a youtube video on reading using the Landmark system, I was already trying to use something similar but this one from the youtube video is a lot easier:



You want to memorize where all the Cs are, and the two G's and F's on each scale as pictured, then you count up or down from those notes. it helps to learn the alphabet up to G backwards too.

Originally I was trying to memorize the top, middle and bottom lines on each scale, but this is not only much more complicated but doesnt spread into the ledger lines like this new system I am using does.

Although I am currently comfortable with reading through and playing a full section of a Joplin piece each day, it is still exhausting and I am continuing to carry on improving my sight reading, though I currently took a pause from reading multiple pieces a day to focus for a bit on learning my current favourite one a bit faster, so what I've found helps is to practice new sections on the piece I'm learning for two days, then on the third day read new sections of other pieces and do my Hanon exercises.

Also as for learning online, there are now loads of youtube videos with tutorials, and I have now asked here for a bit of help with theory, and I learned how to use Sonar X3 for making my songs by asking loads of questions on the forums for that as well as going through all the tutorial videos and exercises. I still cant make any of my songs sound as good as they do in my head though, but I am gradually getting better.

That's really good info for OP - to know the competition.

Hi Tony,
Thanks for the note.

Similar to Synthesia, our product is developed on mobile app. We are improving the product features to give learners better control of their learning (comparing to Youtube videos) while having fun in the process with a gamified experience. The piano teach landscape has become very crowded as you said, so we are trying a different approach to learning.

BTW, Tony, I read your blog. It is very inspiring. Please keep it up

Hi guys,

Thank you so much for the responses!

I've noted down some very good points (transposition and balance for example are quite interesting to look at) and will discuss with our team to see if we can develop and test these ideas further. Will keep everyone posted on the progress.

Have a nice day and stay safe everyone.
Annie