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!

Hi,

I'm 16 years of age now, and I've been playing since I was about 6. I never had a single piano lesson, though my brother has had some, which was the reason why we had a piano.

I saw and heard the stuff he did, and I just tried to play what he was playing earlyer when nobody was around. I guess I developed some kind of ear for it, because nowadays I can play most of the stuff I hear by just repeating it and figuring it out myself.

One of the problems I'm having right now is, I'm on an equal or even higher level of piano playing of most people from my age who've had piano lessons since when they were about 6, if you look at the techniques used and the pieces we can play.

But I can't read any notes! I never even thought of teaching myself how to read any note music, and now I'm trying to do that. I never needed it, because I was still progressing at a good speed, but now I feel like I've reached some kind of barrier. Because even though I can hear and figure out most stuff, there's some really advanced pieces which would take me weeks to figure out, whereas someone just has them written down on paper! It takes a lot of time to learn how to read notes however, and I'm not even close to the fluency some people have when reading notes. I'm seriously considering getting piano lessons just so I'll be able to read note music.

As for the guy above me, I never actually hurt myself. I guess it's up to the people who're playing the piano to figure out where their limit lies, I don't think you'll find it if someone stops you from getting to the edge. Some people just have more stamina then others.

So yea, I hope that answered most of your question? If you have any more you can just ask.

Pk

That's what happens to most people who play by ear. I play by ear, improvise, but also read. You need to learn both, best to learn both, together at the very beginning of learning. Otherwise, as I have seen with many 'play by ear, teach me to read students', they get frustrated because they want to read and play written music on their 'play by ear' level, which is just not possible. It's like convincing a fluent speaker of the English language who cannot read that they must start at kindergarten level to read and write - most get frustrated and many times quit. The other issue is this: When I improvise/play by ear, it is music that would be so difficult to read that, except for classical (which I feel should always be played note for note), I seldom use more than a lead sheet to improvise with or just play it out of my head and people are totally wowed. I can always tell written verses 'by ear or improvised" the latter is usually more impressive

Thanks for your post, rah. I'm classically trained and began learning when I was 7 (now almost 38). I was never really confronted with the idea of needing to improvise on a lead sheet until I left home to go to Uni. A church I went to had most of its music as single line lead sheets with simple chords. I felt completely stuck - it was frustrating!! I could sight read easily and give a basic LH chord pattern based on the written (most often terribly simplistic) progressions.

BUT it did enable me to finally put into practise all the theory base of musicianship that I had been taught (although it seemed quite separate from the practical at the time of learning it). I had a friend who played by ear (but didn't read well) who basically taught me how he improvises and I could see how he was applying the theory 'naturally'.

Thanks again