My Piano Tuition

Summary: Every music student will learn the piano at a different pace; Adults differently compared to kids. This section is written from an adult perspective; in fact from a 50-year old male who is learning to make music at the piano. Read about the journey.

While I appreciate that every music student will learn the piano at a different pace and parts even in a different order, I felt that sharing my experience of music study may give you an idea what to expect in regard to the effort and time required to reach a certain level.

My vision (in June 2007) was to subscribe to teacher-based piano training for the next five years to come. Yes, patience is an art, and we will see how I will progress. This year (2007) will definitely be seen through. I am so hyped up about it, or should I say I enjoy the journey very much.

Another motivator is my new digital piano I got this month (June 2007), a Kawai CN4. It sounds great, has beautiful voices, and is all I wanted at this stage.
November 2008: An even bigger motivator is my new Roland HP207 Digital Piano. This model shows how far the digital piano has come; e.g. replicating the (desired and less desired) "flaws" of acoustic pianos, such as sympathetic string resonance, damper noise and lid positions, inter alia.

One other thing I have noticed since I have been playing: I did not have a headache. Being a left-brainer, music — challenging the right brain — seems to already "do" its magic. 

How It All Started

The trigger was certainly my decision in 2006 to make a lifestyle change. In short: I left a busy entrepreneurial life behind and exchanged it for a salaried position. The latter provides me with predictability of working hours, hence, allowing for the repetitive routine (practicing and) playing the piano requires. While most people find this rather boring, I actually found this to be very liberating and thought: it is about time to have a life where I can plan forward, and slot-in certain events and actions I like, and actually have a chance of getting to enjoy these. Piano or keyboard lessons, at a set time and schedule, are just one example.

So, in early 2007 I decided to fulfil my life-long dream of learning to make music at the piano. No, it was not a New Year's eve resolution ; it was simply time to fulfil this dream. My mother-in-law was visiting from overseas at the time, and I decided to postpone the start time for my tuition for later in the year.

So I went and looked and (re)searched for suitable teachers. Some of my experiences can be found here.
In essence: I narrowed it down to two suitable tutors, Jazz and Popular Piano with Viv Middleton, and Classical Piano with Rachael Turner at  Animato Studio.

Why this Tuition Section?

… on my web space? When my interest in making music at the piano increased to the point that I knew I was keen to take on lessons, I was looking for information about how adult beginners did go about it. I did not find much that would provide me with the journey (effort, time, and other indicators). An idea struck me immediately, derived from the recent (April 2007) experience of re-vamping and consolidating my web space: Why not build a sort of time line or log file, documenting progress? Said, done! Ever since I am adding my lesson experience, and document how I am progressing, the joy, the pain, and what not. I hope you will enjoy the pages!

I had my first piano lesson on June 1^st, 2007. Since then I have spent 1761 hours time on various practice types, as follows:

A Word of Caution

Please be aware of the following indicators (to name a few) regarding progress:

• Do not measure your progress against mine (we have different talent. As for the latter, I believe there is a lot of hard work involved for most of us )
• Rest assured we will progress at a different pace (talent, learning time, practice time, tuition, etc.)
• We will have different goals (classical, popular, for leisure playing, etc.)
• We will invest different amount of time.
• We will struggle with different obstacles.
• We will have different teachers / tutors (bringing different experiences to the table, and with a different ability to identify and educate you according to your goals)

I am sure, if you start learning an instrument from scratch, you should find some sort of idea in my web space about what is involved in such a journey.

Practice Time in Context with Lessons

Progress between lessons depends strongly on practice time invested. I have taken a few notes of my practice time over a 20 day period (August 18th to September 7th, 2007), indicating I am practicing some 85 minutes per day on average. Note reading takes another 40 minutes out of the day; add 20 minutes of theory and related study, and in summary I spend 150 minutes or 2.5 hours per day on my piano study. — I also understand (from e-mail discussions with web site visitors) this is more than the average working adult can actually set aside for any instrument practice.

I have now (September 14th, 2007) added a page showing my most recent progress statistics. This page displays the latest 50 events in my training regime, such as sight-reading, tuition time, practice time, etc. The page has also a link to my training spreadsheet. Feel free to send an e-mail (via the link at the bottom of the page) in case you want to find out more.

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