your first weeks at the piano

Piano is a generous instrument to start on. It is always in tune, the layout is visible, and a complete beginner can play something that sounds like music inside the first few lessons. The things that decide whether the next three years go smoothly, though, are decided in the first few weeks, and most of them are physical.

Here is what the start actually involves, so you know what your teacher is looking at while you play.

how to sit

Sit on the front half of the bench, not back in the middle of it. The bench goes far enough away that your elbows end up slightly in front of your body, roughly level with the white keys. Too close and the wrists collapse; too far and you reach, and reaching turns into tension in the shoulders.

Feet flat on the floor. If your feet do not reach, you need a box or a footstool under them, because a child dangling their legs has nothing to balance against and will slide around on the bench. Back straight but not stiff, shoulders down, head up enough to see the music.

what the hand does

Put your hand on your knee and let it hang naturally. That curved, relaxed shape is the hand shape you want at the keyboard. Knuckles up, fingers rounded, playing on the tips rather than the flat pads, thumb resting on its side near the edge of the key.

The wrist stays loose and roughly level. The sound comes from the weight of the arm dropping through a firm fingertip, not from pressing harder. Your teacher will keep mentioning this for about a year, because it is the difference between a tone that carries and one that bangs.

Fingers are numbered one to five, thumb to little finger, on both hands. Those numbers are written in the music and in your notebook, so learn them in the first week.

reading the keyboard

The black keys come in groups of two and three, and that pattern repeats all the way along. C is the white key immediately to the left of any group of two. Find it, then find every other C on the instrument, and the keyboard stops looking like eighty-eight identical keys.

Everything repeats every seven white notes. Once you know one octave, you know the whole instrument.

your first sounds

Most beginners start with a five-finger pattern in C: thumb on C, one finger per key, up and down, right hand first. Slowly, evenly, counting out loud. It sounds dull and it is teaching your hand to move independently of your arm.

Left hand gets the same treatment on its own, and it will feel noticeably worse. That is normal and it closes up within a few weeks. Hands together comes after both of them work separately, and the first attempt is always slower than you expect.

starting to read

Piano reading uses two staves at once, which is the main reason piano reading takes longer than on most instruments. Teachers usually start from middle C and work outwards in both directions, so each new note is one step from one you already know.

Count out loud from the very first piece. Students who learn to count while playing rarely develop rhythm problems; students who learn the notes first and add the counting later almost always do.

practising at home in the first month

Fifteen minutes a day, most days, beats an hour at the weekend. Short sessions suit the way physical habits form, and they suit a school week.

If you are practising on a digital instrument, aim for eighty-eight weighted keys and a sustain pedal. Smaller unweighted keyboards are fine for the first month or two, then they start teaching the fingers the wrong amount of effort, and the difference shows as soon as the student sits at an acoustic piano in a lesson room.

what usually goes wrong first

Four things, in roughly this order. The thumb collapses and plays flat on its pad. The eyes stay glued to the hands instead of the page, which makes reading much slower later. The tempo creeps up until the hard bar arrives. And the easy half of the piece gets played ten times while the difficult half gets played once.

All four are easy to correct early and annoying to correct late, which is the real argument for a teacher in the first term. Private and group piano lessons run at BKK1 and Toul Kork; email hello@supersound.asia if you want to come and try one.