Hi guys i'm Jazer I play the piano. In this video I want to share with you the biggest mistakes
I've made in 18 years of learning and playing the piano. After watching this video, my hope is that
you will get some insight into how to learn this instrument faster. What you should do. What you
shouldn't do, so you can save time play the pieces you want and have an enriching and motivated piano
experience for years to come. Before we get into it all, make sure you LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to this
channel to stay in touch with more of these free piano lessons and tutorials. Mistake Number 1 is
"NOT LEARNING ENOUGH PIECES". Here's what you need to know about learning piano if you want
to keep things interesting for yourself. If you want to stay motivated and learn for years, you're
going to need to build up a decent repertoire of pieces to practice and play. One of the mistakes
I see a lot of people make is they work hard and learn, let's say, 4 pieces and then they just
stop learning new pieces. And they play those four pieces for the rest of their lives. You're
going to get bored of those 4 pieces. If you're one of these people but why do people only learn
4 pieces and then just stop learning new stuff? The reason is because, and this is especially at
the beginner journey, learning each new piece takes a really long time. Here's the thing you
need to know about learning new pieces. The more pieces you learn, the less time it takes to learn
each new piece. This is because with each new piece that you tackle you're learning different
transferable skills such as techniques, key signatures, chord patterns, melodic patterns. Over
time when you build and learn all these skills you'll be able to learn each new piece with much
less time because you have all this experience going into a piece. In the past, it would used
to take 3 months to learn, for example, a simple 3 minute piece let's use a simple example...
That was the Chopin Nocturne in E flat. In the past, when I learned this 10 years ago
I probably took around something like 3 months just to learn this simple three-minute piece.
But if you ask me to learn something that's around this length and around this difficulty these days,
I can learn and play within days. I'm saying this to show you that when you learn lots of pieces,
you'll build experience. And you can do the same thing too, to learn pieces very very quickly. So
to conclude this point, I recommend you to make it a point to learn extra pieces. Challenge yourself.
You can absolutely do it. See if you can learn 12 pieces in a year. So that 12 months in a year,
see if you can learn one piece per month. If you can find the energy and the motivation to do this,
you'll find that this energy and motivation will sustain itself and piano will always
remain an interesting subject to you because you always have something to improve and something
to work towards. Never ever settle guys. Keep on improving. Mistake Number 2 is "NOT
PRACTISING ENOUGH". Now I know this sounds really intuitive and common sense. But I have something
interesting to share with you in this video that you may not have heard of. From my experience of
being a student and a teacher, I think we're not completely honest with ourselves when it comes to
practice times. When I was younger especially when let's say I wanted to practice for 60 minutes and
when the clock reaches, let's say 50 minutes, I'll sort of count that as "Oh I've already done my 60
minutes and take myself off." And, and think I've finished for the day. Piano is a very self-driven
endeavor. It's very different to, let's say, in sports training. I want to share with you
that I personally play badminton and I go for badminton training. And during my training, my
coach is able to give me exercises and make sure I stay accountable to those exercises. For example,
if he asks me to do 4 sets of 20 push-ups and he's standing right there, I kind of have to do
those push-ups. But in contrast with piano, a lot of the times we're just practicing by ourselves
and no one's really there to check what we're doing or how we're doing. How much you train or
what you train during your piano practice sessions is entirely up to you. So no one
really knows if what you're practicing during your practice sessions is actually helpful for
your improvement. The thing in my sport training is my coach is always there to basically isolate
the weak areas and try to improve in those areas. But in my experience of observing
students and observing myself practice as well we don't really like working on our weaker areas.
We like to do things we're good at for example to play through pieces that we already know
really well. We tend to put off the more difficult tasks such as maybe practicing a weak passage for
20 times slowly. For example, I would see maybe some students do something like this so...
Okay let's say they mess up something some part like that when it's meant to be...
Okay students when they mess up they often tend to gloss over those mistakes
and not actually ask themselves, 'well why did we make a mistake there?' so for example,
I want to encourage students when they're practicing and when they're making mistakes
to actually ask yourself 'what actually was the mistake?' Part about what was the exact connection
point that things fell apart. We're going really, really detailed like, like within the bar. Within
a chord shape. What is the exact part that we made a little error that we didn't intend to?
try to isolate that part and try to work on it mistake number three is not spending more time on
music theory have you ever had this experience of learning a piece of music and seeing all the notes
on the page and just feeling like well these are just a whole bunch of really random dots
it's like you're just blindly following the instructions without any deeper understanding
of what's actually going on in the music now without going into too much detail this is
why we need music theory because music theory will allow us to actually understand what we're playing
when you understand what you're playing when you understand this music system you actually learn
each new piece with a lot more speed here's a language example to talk about what i mean i want
to put five words on the screen here please read the sentence now if i wanted you to memorize this
sentence and write it on a piece of paper would you have any issues with that now quite likely
if you've understood everything i'm saying in this video and you can read and write in english
chances are this sentence is not too difficult to memorize i want to eat fruits you can write
it out pretty quickly but what if i asked you to memorize let's say this one or let's say this one
or let's say even this one so these three sentences are translations of the previous
english sentence now chances are some of you will know some of these languages but try to look at
one that you don't know how to read let's say i now asked you to memorize this sentence and write
it on a piece of paper would you think that's easier or more difficult than the english one
well obviously it's more difficult than english one because we don't know this language so just
fyi this is mandarin chinese arabic and russian and to see and observe a language that we don't
understand it might feel a little bit random right it's like why does that character go this way and
and why is it grouped together like these these are some of the questions you might be wondering
as a biased english speaker so if we go back to music for a second i think trying to learn
lots of piano pieces without properly studying music theory is kind of like trying to memorize
all these different languages without studying the language itself you can kind of scrape by
but it's a lot easier and much more meaningful if you simply study the language to understand
its alphabet system to understand how the grammar works to understand how the vocab works all these
skills will help you to make sense of the language and actually navigate through that language
very easily so i recommend you to study music theory it will help you tremendously well here
at our last one mistake 4 is not listening to the pieces that you are practicing now when i'm
talking about listening to the pieces i'm talking about going onto youtube or spotify or somewhere
to listen to other pianists who play the same piece the reason i advocate for this
by listening to established pianos who have played already the piece that you want to learn
you can visualize yourself playing through the final product there's been so many times where
let's say i'm learning a piece i'm getting stuck at a part or i just don't feel very motivated
i simply go and just listen to a professional pianist play that piece for three or four times
and i start to get into this space of oh this is what the finished product sounds like it starts
to really motivate me i can visualize what the finish line looks like and i just go full speed
at finishing the whole thing listening to a piece that you're practicing also helps you
to spot out the mistakes that are happening during your practice sessions so for example
now i don't know if you could pick up a little mistake there instead of the e
flat i played the e natural now if you were to hear the nocturne in e flat quite a few times
you would pick up these little things that let's say you accidentally learned
that part as e-natural instead of e-flat listening to the piece a lot will help you to be your own
teacher and correct your own mistakes when you're practicing we have come to the end of this video
which of these mistakes can you relate to the most let me know in the comments let me also know
if you have any other piano related questions 90 of this channel's content comes from your
questions so ask me below please remember to subscribe and i'll catch you in the next video
you