Do you think its possible to teach yourself to read music and play?

Hi
I go to a proper piano teacher, and can't imagine making progress without her telling me where I am going wrong. I heard about someone that is teaching them selves, and I can't imagine how this would work.What do you think? could it work?

Hi Carmella, I'm self taught to play the piano, but I did learn some music in school. In highschool I played the trumpet for a semester. The little acronyms, Every good boy deserves fudge. They stuck with me. To make progress i did have to apply myself, but I inherited my musical ability and playing, composing and arranging comes very easily to me. I also write vocals, and do harmonies, both 2nd and 3rd part, all by ear. I memorize any pieces written by other that I learn. It can take a little while, but I have my secret techniques I like to use, and usually within a few days I'll have a piece down.

To someone who doesn't watch me play I sound very convincing, and to an untrained ear I might as well be in a concert hall. (That gets corrected, as I tell tham my qualifications are far from that. The flattery is still nice, though. LOL)

It certainly is possible to teach one's self to play any instrument. Heredity makes a big difference, but some people just have a knack for it, regardless of family history.

That is my opinion and experience. If you ever get a chance to listen to someone who has taught themselves, please listen. Some of our techniques are considered "bastardized" by many teachers, but the ingenuity that accompanies self taught players is remarkable.

Good question, and thank you for posting.

~B~

I'm a piano teacher. (A proper one I hope.)

You don't need a teacher for everything - you can learn a lot on your own, if you are determined to keep at it. If you give up easily, then trying to learn by yourself won't work very well.

The two best and most important things to learn by yourself are reading music and memorizing. These topics can be boring but are not very hard, you can learn them from books, and if you make mistakes in reading or memorizing you can just correct them tomorrow. And you don't even have to own a piano to do them! You can learn reading and memorizing while sitting in an easy chair.

How to work your hands and arms at the piano is the part where most people really need help from a teacher. Some people learn this by themselves too, but it's much harder than learning to read, it's hard to get it from a book because the books are hard to understand, and if you do it wrong you will waste a LOT of time, and could even injure yourself badly.

The people who get injured the most are the eager hard-working ones who think they are doing fine. They don't realize that they're pressing too hard, making their muscles too stiff, and so on. Lazy people don't get injured so often. (They might not learn much, but at least they don't get hurt.)

Please don't practice advanced-level music without help from a teacher. But if you show up to your first lesson with the new teacher and you already have a bunch of music memorized, you might turn out to be their new star student!