It kinda sucks that you learn much slower when you’re older though. I’ve been practicing piano an hour or two a day for 7 months and I don’t really feel like I’ve improved at all. I was intermediate when I started and I am taking professional lessons. Mid 30s here.
I don't know, I think standards are just higher as an adult. When I was a teenager, I thought I learned things quickly, but in reality I was still a novice. Now that I'm older I don't feel like I pick things up more slowly, but I definitely am more aware of how much work it takes to be good at pretty much anything.
I don't pick things up nearly as fast now (early 40s) as I was when I was younger (pre-tten, teen, 20s, and 30s). However, I also pick things up in a very different way that in some ways, are more effective than when I was young.
For example, it takes me longer to gain the intuition of something, but on the other hand, when I do, it plugs into a vaster web of knowledge. I am certainly more disciplined in both mind and body compared to when I was younger. I'm capable of clearer visualization and simulations now than before. I've got a lot more math under my belt.
I learned piano as a kid, picked it up pretty fast, and forgot a lot of it. I am not practiced in sight reading any more. On the other hand, when I poked around learning again, it's tapping much deeper into music theory, composition. For example, I learned Petzold's Minute in G Major (formerly attributed to Bach) as a kid and as an adult. I still can't quite get both hands working together as an adult ... but I was cracking up as I kept seeing how beautiful the chords are composed together in a way I never noticed as a kid.
The other day, I heard about this lady that started playing the piano in her 60s when we she retired. Fast forward to 20(?) years later and she's giving professional concerts and everyone just assumes she's been playing the piano all her life.
In other words: Keep it up, you'll the reap the fruit of your labor eventually!
> In other words: Keep it up, you'll the reap the fruit of your labor eventually!
No, you won't necessarily reap the fruit of your labor. You will certainly improve, but most of us will face a hard upper limit with diminishing returns as an adult.
I've played trumpet and guitar since age 13. I started learning piano ~10 years ago, age 40. But even after a decade with thousands of hours of practice, I still can't "natively" read bass clef. I still mis-read G as E, e.g., if I'm not actively paying close attention. Where I could sight-read treble clef basically perfectly since I was a kid, I'm still clumsy on bass clef after 10 years of learning as an adult.
Defeat yourself and you won't need time to do it for you. Maybe there is a hard limit, maybe you've hit a false peak, a local maxima. If you've hit a plateau, try something else, you probably only hit the limit of your current methods.
I am improving it's just really, really slow. My teacher is working on my weaknesses as well. It just seems like I have to increase my effort 3 fold to have a chance at reaching advanced any time in the near future.
I'm not sure how it applies to learning, but for any activity based on consistency and quantity, I find it wild how quickly time seems to shrink and "writing 500 words a day" seems to overnight turn into "I wrote 100k words in the last 3 years". My goal at this point in life (42) is not really to get better at stuff, but just focus on doing what I like and want to be doing, while leading a stable life.
The interesting thing with that is the only way people really master things is when they just like what they're doing enough to put up with the difficulty of getting to that level.
You probably improved alot. Is there an objective test. If that test can be rescaled by a function to linear based on average person’s time even better.
This guy has a lot of really great videos on how to practice smarter and has a lot of answers to dumb questions that you don't really wanna ask. I hope it helps.
I quite disagree. Started to learn extremely young (3 years old) and I guess my relationship with the instrument became second nature.
I feel there is a kind of threshold that you cross at some point and then, the skill becomes part of you, forever engraved. You know you're there when you can play the piano without a piano, just in your head and in the tingle of your muscles. When you do not need a rational stage like a score or even a piece to play. You just play what you feel.
I don't play that often now, maybe 30 mins to an hour once every two or three days.
My technique is not as good as it used to be. But my understanding of music, harmony and emotion is deeper. My music is better now than when I was at my peak as a technician, because as a human being, I matured.
Similar with me and trumpet. I started in 6th grade and was very serious about it through high school. Put the trumpet down for probably 25 years. Then I got the bug in me again and started practicing and getting my chops back. In almost no time, I was once again an "advanced trumpet player" -- solid tone, good range, etc. My fingers are a bit less nimble and out of shape, but the core tone is there. That instrument is --as you say-- part of me, forever engraved.
That's very much not been my experience. I learned to play when I was in grade school, took most of a decade off during college and early 20s, then picked it back up.
I also had an enforced multi-year hiatus when I broke my arm at age 35.
I might need to do some extra drills and practice to get back to where I had been, but the fundamentals never left. Like riding a bike - might be out of shape, but I still know how everything works.
That's not been my experience with the piano. I definitely forgot a lot. Maybe I never got the fundamentals set enough. It wasn't my lifelong passion either.
You don't forget how to ride a bike because the bike is doing most of the work. Because of physics, a bike stays better balanced when it is moving.
Compare that to say, pro racers, mountain bikers, trick riders, etc. there are significantly more skill involved in those than casually riding around.
People who are saying "Guitar" or "Piano" don't play insturments.
The cello:
1. You're literally sitting when you play, whereas many violinists, violists, and bass players have to stand.
2. Big enough strings to not cause a player to develop callouses, no pain/bleeding.
3. Almost always only play one string at a time - no knowledge needed of chords.
4. Until you get ultra good, you will only need to learn 1 clef, and only a handful of key signatures
I think guitar and piano are among the harder of instruments to learn. Bowed string instruments are among the easiest.
A friend learns Piano and she has tried some instruments. She told me cello and violin are one of the most difficult to even begin. But I will explore this.
Piano or guitar are probably the best instruments for fastest path to gratification i.e. you can play something vaguely nice sounding pretty quickly, on the other of a couple months.
With string instruments you sound like a crying baboon for 2 years, and with brass instruments you sound like an underwater crow for 2 years.
I could recommend taiko (Japanese) drums as an adult hobby. You very quickly get off the ground in terms of making wonderful music together with a group.
sorry, in fact i think its hard to play any instrument, but my experience is with piano only. i studied hard for 18 months in my mid 30s and could play many pieces of Erik Satie and some other musicians.
Piano requires adaptation in the corpus callosum of your brain to coordinate two-handed playing - it takes time to develop. Competent players have usually been playing for years to a decade before they're at a level of public performance.
My anecdotal experience is that someone who starts at 25 and plays until 35 will be a shadow of a 15yo who started at 5. Are there concert pianists who started late, say post-puberty? I think maybe jazz, but the standards are pretty different.
Most children who start to learn instruments at some point just stop doing it. Kids who actually turn into concert pianists undergo rigorous training that is effectively a full time job. How many adults at age 25 have even attempted that? Just in financial terms, how many adults have spent the resources on themselves that the parents of highly competitive kids do?
Most adults who pick up skills just don't do it in a deliberate way. When I moved to Japan for work I thought as an adult it'd take me years to acquire a new language. But the company I worked for got me professional training and I hunkered down about 2 hours per day and in ~14 months I did much better than I thought was possible.
One aspect of it is that the 5-15 kid has a ton more spare time. And when practicing is able to be more immersed, not bugged down by real life chores and problems like the 25-35.
Personal history: I started playing guitar around 18 and at ~25 I was way ahead most of my 18-20 year old peers who had started way younger. And I was a jazz snob since like 20.
I did learn the basics of piano and reading music when I was around 7 but never played actively, but it might've helped that I didn't start from scratch at 18. But I was immersed once I started - music was literally all I did in my spare time aside from doing drugs. :D
I'm now in my 40s and have been learning piano for the past 2 or so years. I think I've been progressing quite fast, but it's easy since I already know what to do, it's just another instrument (the challenge is mainly the hand coordination).
Not my experience at all… I learn faster at 40 than I did when I was younger. I don’t feel like anything is slower, plus I have the decision-making ability to actually do things efficiently as unappealing as that initially is.
