My Piano Journey

18 Jan 2021

The last week of November 2020 I decided that I would take the leap and finally learn to play an instrument. My spouse has quite a few instruments lying around the house but I eventually landed on learning the piano. I did this for two main reasons. The first being that the instrument appeared straightforward enough that I thought I could easily learn how to work with the instrument. The second reason was that all other instruments are designated for either right-handed people which I am not.

What’s the plan?

When I decided to go on this journey I knew I had to get learning materials as well as come up with attainable goals. To that end, I spent my last week of November doing some research on how I can succeed in this project. I ended up selecting Alfred’s Adult All-in-One Course as my learning material and creating a Google Sheets document to set my goals and track my practice sessions. My overarching goal with this project was to complete the Alfred book and walk away with the ability to play one of my favorite jazz pieces “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)”. In addition to my main goal I had a few more activities that I planned to complete as part of my learning:

• Practice time is not set but I am aiming to get about an hour of practice on most days.
• I should be mastering a new scale every other week for a total of 3.
• Staggered between my new scales I should master a new chord every other week.
• Every day I will record my time spent practicing, a couple of other details, and my self playing.

How did I do?

• Out of the 31 days in December I only missed 4 days. All of these days fell close to the holidays.
• Of the 27 days of practice, I spent less than an hour at the piano for only 9 of them.
• Of the 3 scales I was planning on learning I only learned 1.
• My book covered a lot more chords than I thought it would so I learned well over what I intended.
• I got to page 95 of the Alfred book at the end of the project. This is about 65% through the book.
• I did not end up learning the jazz piece that I wanted. The skill level needed to play this piece was too far beyond what is covered in my text.
• I did not record myself playing each day. My setup for recording wasn’t the best and because I was recording such a difficult piece I wasn’t able to make progress on it quick enough to inspire myself to keep recording.

Closing thoughts.

Overall, I ended the month feeling much more knowledgeable about music theory and with the ability to play a couple of simple tunes on the piano. I’m taking a break in January but once I get back in the swing of practice there are a couple of other things I want to do. Namely:

• Set-up analytics on my practice record so that I can see if there are any trends in my progress
• I want to test different practice times for a couple of weeks in a row and record how I felt that day. This is meant to get a measure of how likely I am to keep up my practice as well as an attempt to determine what amount of time is most productive for me.
• Goal setting needs to be improved. When I originally started this project I was very naive in what I chose as goals.
• I want to track multiple simultaneous sources that I work through (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, other texts, etc.)