I’ve dabbled with musical instruments over the years, but I’ve never really gone anywhere near a piano and I’ve decided I quite like the idea of learning. Happily this weekend I discovered that we still have one of the keyboards my son used fairly early on. It’s a Yamaha PSR-E353, so it only has five octaves rather than the full piano complement, but there’s always my son’s electric piano if/when I reach the stage of needing more notes. I just won’t have access to that out of term time, so the Yamaha is more convenient for the time being.
As for how to learn, I’m dithering at the moment. I’ve been watching some of the videos on Andrew Furmanczyk’s YouTube channel. I find the music theory stuff good because I don’t know a lot about that, but the first “learning piano” one is perhaps a bit childish in places and rambles a little. I’ll stick with it though and see how the later lessons are. From the point of view of being an author of open-source software, I certainly appreciate that they exist and are available for free.
I’ve also bought a couple of books:
- Adult All-in-One Course: Lesson, Theory, Technique Level 1 (Alfred’s Basic Adult Piano Course)
- Faber Piano Adventures: Adult Piano Adventures All-in-One Lesson Book 1
I picked the spiral-bound versions so they’ll sit flat on a music stand or desk. Going through a few reviews they seemed to be the closest match to the kind of thing I’d be after, so I’ll see how I get on with them as well and post a review when I have a good feel for what’s what. Perhaps I’ll review Andrew Furmanczyk’s lessons on a video-by-video basis too.
Oh! I nearly forgot… The other important purchase I made was a set of headphones. I don’t need to inflict the sound of me practising on the rest of my family just yet 😀