The Piano Salon

Be Patient

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Everything in life takes time — and learning the piano is no exception. Mistakes should not frustrate you, because, as we all know, we learn through mistakes. If you cannot master a particular passage even after several attempts and repetitions, the problem is often not your concentration or ability, but the approach. At that moment, the task may simply be too demanding. Together we should analyze where the difficulties lie. Often the solution is quite simple — for example, it might help to change the fingering.

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Set Clear and Realistic Goals

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A valuable tip for learning the piano — and actually for any undertaking — is to set clear and realistic goals. Depending on your playing experience and level, it is important not to put yourself under pressure with overly ambitious deadlines. A beautiful, relatively simple piece can be learned by a complete beginner within a few months, but not necessarily in time for your best friend’s birthday party next weekend.

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Choose the Right Piece

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It is important to select a piece that is neither too easy nor too difficult and that matches your current level of playing. Being able to play a favorite song on the piano can be very motivating. But be careful — goals that are too ambitious can quickly lead to frustration.

Beginners should start with simple pieces that require only a few notes in the left hand and are written in easy keys with few or no accidentals. Pieces with complicated rhythms, demanding fingerings, large chords, frequent hand shifts, or fast finger movements should be avoided at first, as they require more advanced musical experience and knowledge. However, we gradually practice all these elements step by step using manageable and easier pieces.

Don’t worry — all the pieces we choose for our students are carefully selected to achieve specific methodological and technical goals.

Practice Each Hand Separately

Before playing with both hands together, practice each hand separately and, if possible, from memory. At first this may seem inconvenient, but it will ultimately help you reach your goal faster. Our brain needs to learn and store the movements of the right and left hand separately before it can coordinate them simultaneously. Mistakes or uncertainties in one hand can confuse the other hand, even if it has already been practiced well, and may disrupt its movements. When one of my students has difficulties with a passage, I often find that the problem lies in only one of the hands.

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Read the Musical Score Carefully

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Occasional mistakes while playing are not a major problem and can easily be corrected during the next repetition. It is different when notes, fingerings, or movements are learned incorrectly from the beginning — correcting them later becomes much more difficult. It takes twice as much time to correct wrong habits and relearn them than to learn them correctly from the start.

Why? In addition to cognitive, auditory, and visual learning, what is known as muscle memory also plays a major role in piano playing. This is the moment when the fingers play a piece almost automatically, without actively thinking about it, because the movements have already been internalized. That is why it sometimes happens that the fingers instinctively move toward the wrong note, even when we consciously try to avoid the mistake.

For this reason, it is especially important during the learning process to carefully check the musical score and the fingering to ensure that everything is practiced correctly from the very beginning. 🎹