the internet is a brilliant place to learn piano you can self-teach yourself chords scales
basic music theory and download any kind of sheet music to get started playing right away
if you're just playing purely for fun then you arguably don't need a teacher that being said if
you want to progress to more complicated pieces i highly suggest you finding a teacher or a mentor
hi i'm jaisa in this video i want to share with you five common pitfalls of self-taught pianists
i will not only share with you what they are i want to also give you solutions to combating
them i will count them down from number five to number one so make sure you stick until the end
to find out what number one is before we get into everything make sure you subscribe to this channel
so you stay in touch with more of these free piano lessons and tutorials number five on the
list is poor technique and within poor technique there's a couple of things i want to talk about
the first thing is tension so when i see self-taught pianist play
sometimes they look like they're lifting weights or something when they're playing
you know sort of have this huge tension in their forearms and not only can you visibly see it you
can also hear it in their playing it's not fluent and easy and flowy and i have huge empathy for
this tension problem it's because when you're playing the piano it's a highly complex tasks
right you have 10 fingers that are doing different things so it feels like
there's 10 different apps that are running at the same time and you just have one brain to try to
make sense of everything and make everything work inevitably because it's so complex and you're so
focused on so many different things you could be doing a lot of subconscious things like just
tensing your arm when you don't need to be the second thing within poor technique is the poor
finger independence try and exercise with me guys i need your right hand first can you
please hold down every note in the c position c d e f g like this okay so now i want you to
be playing your thumb eight times but keep these other four pressed down so like this
and move on to the next finger but everything is kept down next one
next one
and then you can try that also with your left hand of course now how did you go with that exercise
if that exercise felt completely difficult and undoable it probably means you don't have as
much finger independence as you probably can have finger independence is really important in piano
playing because like i was saying before when you're playing piano it's a highly complex task
and it's almost like having 10 different apps running and you need each app to do its things
so that everything can run smoothly when you have for example a weak finger for example the fourth
often is a weak finger you know when that doesn't have enough finger independence it's
going to start to affect other fingers too so it's gonna affect for example the fifth or the third
when the fourth isn't working properly poor technique is an interesting thing to talk about
because when you do something for months and years it becomes ingrained into your subconscious and
it's really hard to change it later now wanting to get brilliant technique on piano doesn't happen
overnight it takes years of training i've been playing the piano for 18 years and i'm still
continuing to refine my technique every day but here are a few quick solutions i have for you
i have three things for you first thing would be to play with slightly curved fingers like this
not like this
okay slightly curved second thing is to lower your wrist so if you put the meaty part of your
hand on the white keys and you just move it out this way that should be where your wrist is
so not too high and not too low just around there
so meaty part on the white keys and just move out and one more thing is to stay close to the
keyboard so when you're playing your music try not to lift especially your thumb up okay so stay
everything as close to the keyboard as possible so you have the most control it's not easy to do
but we should always try to do it number four on the list is poor counting or poor rhythm
so when i see self-taught pianist play sometimes their
rhythm or tempo is really unregulated for example they'll play something like this
something like that you know when it's supposed to be
because self-taught pianists are always playing by themselves and they don't have feedback from a
teacher or a friend sometimes they don't realize parts that they are playing either faster or
slower and like the thing that was saying before if you continually practice for weeks and months
in the wrong way suddenly that becomes your subconscious behavior and then it's really really
hard to change after that so it's so important to get that counting and that beat steady when
you're practicing piano what are some solutions to help yourself keep and beat metronome practice is
a clear favorite of mine and many piano teachers okay you can use a traditional one like this one
or an electronic one or also maybe even a watch and this is a recent purchase i've had that i
am so in love with i'll just show you what that is in a second so what's a metronome a metronome
is something that helps you to keep time so you set a speed so if you go all the way up there
it clicks at a very slow tempo and all the way down here
it clicks at a really fast tempo so for example what would be good to do as you're practicing as a
self-taught pianist is to regularly practice with metronome so you're staying completely on beat
now recently i've had the great pleasure of buying this soundbrenner metronome watch
and it's been such a delight because i think it takes the metronome practice to just
a ridiculously higher level instead of hearing the beat i'm actually feeling the beat on my wrist
so i do a double tap and right now as you can see it's i don't know if you can
hear it in the microphone as well it i can feel a really strong vibration on my wrist
it's just wonderful i'm actually going to do videos just talking about this watch and why it's
so helpful for pianists so stay tuned for those number three on the list is poor sight reading so
when we talk about sight reading and self-taught pianists i think a lot of self-taught pianists
suffer in sight reading because they use something called synthesia now lots of piano teachers
dislike synthesia because it doesn't teach people to read sheet music i think synthesia
has some good points and also some bad points the bad thing of synthesia is that when you become
overly reliant on this visual representation of notes coming down and pressing on them
you never really learn to read these black dots on a page which is a shame because
this is how 99 of the world communicates with each other in music also synthesia doesn't really teach
you fingerings so you never really learn how to use your hand properly but the great thing about
synthesia is that it gives you a really quick way of learning something without needing to be
great at reading sheet music it's really good for motivation right sometimes you don't want to wait
you know years before you can play the pieces you want you want to get started quickly and from a
motivational standpoint i think that's important because we should all play pieces that we're
passionate about you know we can all relate to the times in our piano lessons when for example if you
have a teacher that gives you lots of pieces you don't really like reading and playing you know
you can feel sort of low motivation as you go weekly to your lessons you just sometimes want
to play what you really want to play so synthetic is really good for that giving a quick solution to
to help people to play what they want to play but as i said before synthesia does have its drawbacks
okay learning to read the sheet music is a very essential part of your piano playing journey
sometimes i think people who have learned on synthesia for years are sort of like people that
can speak a language but don't know how to read and write it feels like they can get by but they
just have this huge handicap and they can never really go past a certain level so if you never
learn how to read sheet music i think you will get really great at piano playing and then you'll hit
a certain point where it's impossible to go up and you're sort of wondering well why can't i go
up and it's because you can't read sheet music and then when you go oh so you think i better
learn some sheet music now but then now when you have to go from this level all the way down
and learn oh this is uh this is c oh and this is d it becomes a really like it's hard to go from a
high level down back to level zero so it's kind of like the person i was saying before the person who
can speak really well but doesn't know how to read and write and then now having to go
back to level zero and learn a b c d it can be a hard journey so the solution i have for you is to
always read a little bit of music even if it's just four bars a day read a bit of music every
day number two on the list is poor fingering now i'm gonna play something twice for you the
first playing is how i see a lot of self-taught pianist play and the second time is the better
playing i want you to see if you can spot any differences in playing one and two playing one is
this
playing two is this
did you spot any differences no it's a really subtle difference but the second time of playing
i was using much smarter and more efficient fingering that made the whole thing sound
nicer and felt easier to play in the first playing which is what i see a lot of self pianists do is
do you see this this kind of
if you were to play piano for longer you'll know that this using your five to play these
three notes is just not a smart way of using your hand it's much smarter to go
in this turn to do three two one that way you have enough fingers see that that's much easier than
so it's these little things that i think when you compound over time and you don't get proper
fingering instructions piano playing it sort of feels like you hit a cap and you can't go much
further because you don't know how to use your hands efficiently my solution for you is to try to
either buy or download scores with fingerings and try to follow them as strictly as you can because
fingerings are usually written by editors who are real pianists that can actually help you to plan
how to use your hand as efficiently as possible okay down to our number one thing number one is
poor practicing methods and this is where people practice things in a wrong way and they take ages
to learn a piece practicing efficiently and in a correct way is a huge underlying message
really in all the videos you see on this channel i am very interested in almost kind of hijacking
or finding a much better way to practice so that we can all save time when i look at students
or pianists around me i feel like most people practice in a way that isn't optimal and actually
wastes a lot of time i have a challenge for you if something that would usually take you about one
hour to master if i say to you you only have today 10 minutes to practice and i want you to achieve
the same results as if you had an hour how would you do it firstly i want to say that's completely
possible because i do this too i always say to my students what can take other people one hour to
do i can probably do it in 10 minutes or less not because i have more experience but because i have
a better way of practicing there are many many different ways to practice correctly there are
tons of ways to practice wrongly but i want to give you one thing to think about today
for practicing correctly one of the ways to practice correctly is definitely to
practice in smaller sections and repeat that for seven times for example if we were to play
if i were a beginner learning this piece by the time i reach you know bar 9 10 11 i've
essentially already forgotten what my hands were doing in the first couple of bars the
much better way of practice is to focus for example only on the first two bars so one
two
three and i usually call it out myself too so i keep track of this seven times
and so on and so forth and when you reach the seventh time you should feel
that in that seventh time you're not actually needing to think about it too much anymore
it sort of is happening on autopilot and how wonderful is that because that's the
whole idea of practice right the whole idea of practicing is to practice it
so that it becomes in your subconscious and you don't have to consciously think about it
so that your conscious mind can now think about something else which is to learn more music
so i highly recommend this section is to practice correctly and one way of practicing correctly is
to do it in small sections and repeat it for seven times we have come to the end of this video which
of these five things can you relate to the most please let me know in the comments below i read
all the comments that you write hope you have fun practicing and i'll catch you in the next video