How do I learn piano as an adult beginner?

Piano is unusually well suited to adult learners because the notes are laid out visibly and logically. The difficulty is coordination between the hands, and that responds directly to slow, targeted practice.

What you'll need

• A digital piano or keyboard, ideally 88 weighted keys
• A metronome or metronome app
• An adjustable stool or a chair at the right height

Step by step

1. Get weighted keys if you possibly can.Eighty-eight fully weighted keys with touch sensitivity. Unweighted keyboards build the wrong technique and produce no dynamic control, and moving to a real piano later is then a fresh start.
2. Set the height correctly.Forearms roughly parallel with the floor and wrists level, elbows slightly higher than the keys rather than lower. Poor height causes tension and eventually pain.
3. Learn where middle C is and orient from it.The groups of two and three black keys are the map. C sits immediately to the left of every group of two. Everything else is found by relation to that.
4. Learn to read music slowly alongside playing.You can start by ear or from letter names, but reading opens up everything written. Ten minutes of note reading in each session builds it painlessly.
5. Practise hands separately first.Right hand alone until it is comfortable, then left hand alone, and only then together. Attempting both hands from the start is the single biggest cause of stalling.
6. Use a metronome from the beginning.Slow, steady and painfully unexciting. Even timing is what makes music sound competent, and it is much harder to add later than to build in from the start.
7. Practise slower than feels necessary.Play at the speed at which you make no mistakes, which is usually much slower than you would like. Speed emerges from accuracy; practising fast just rehearses errors.
8. Work on the bars you cannot play.Isolate the two or three difficult bars and repeat them. Playing the whole piece from the start each time means practising the easy opening dozens of times and the hard part twice.
9. Learn the fingering and stick to it.The numbers in the score are there for a reason — they let the hand reach the next notes. Improvising fingering feels fine at slow speed and blocks you at tempo.
10. Practise scales and chords a little.Not for their own sake, but because they are the building blocks of most music and they teach the hand shapes that recur everywhere.
11. Play music you actually like.Simplified arrangements of pieces you want to play, alongside whatever method you follow. Motivation is the limiting factor for adult learners, not aptitude.
12. Consider a teacher, even occasionally.Hand position, posture and tension problems are almost impossible to spot in yourself, and they cause injuries. A lesson a month catches them early.
13. Practise twenty minutes daily.Every day beats a long weekend session. Coordination is a physical skill and it consolidates between sessions, particularly overnight.

Tips

• Hands separately, then together. Skipping this stalls more adult beginners than anything else.
• Practise at the speed where you make no mistakes, then increase gradually.
• Isolate the hard bars. Running the whole piece is playing, not practising.

Common mistakes

• Buying an unweighted keyboard to start — It builds no finger strength and no dynamic control, and the technique does not transfer to a real piano. Weighted keys cost more and are the difference between learning piano and learning a keyboard.
• Always playing pieces from the beginning — The opening gets practised many times and the difficult passage almost never. Improvement comes from repeating the specific bars you cannot play.

If it doesn't work

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