Teaching myself Piano

KrunkMcGrunk

Does anyone know any good, beginner-friendly books for teaching yourself piano?

I have some experience playing the bells/xylophone, but that was a loonnng time ago.

afrowoman

my first beginning piano books were "Alfred's Basic Piano Library".

Lykouragh

I learned on Alfred's and loved them- of course, I was pretty young at the time.

Beginner piano, assuming you already know how to read music, is a lot about muscle memory and developing correct technique. If you can't afford a weekly lesson with some college music major, I would recommend something visual to show you how you should be positioning and moving your hands.

KrunkMcGrunk

Lykouragh wrote: »

I learned on Alfred's and loved them- of course, I was pretty young at the time.

Beginner piano, assuming you already know how to read music, is a lot about muscle memory and developing correct technique. If you can't afford a weekly lesson with some college music major, I would recommend something visual to show you how you should be positioning and moving your hands.

OK, good idea. Thanks!

Khavall

Yeah, if at all possible, get a teacher of some sort. Or a friend who plays piano who can check your technique every once in a while, and can get you started. If you end up continuing with it, it's super-easy to have incorrect technique, and super, super, super hard to fix it. And that's just fixing it... with improper technique you can do some terrible shit to your wrists, since it's basically like making an entirely un-ergonomic computer keyboard take about 10 times as much force to work, and typing all day with no wrist pad or anything.

It's possible to self teach instruments, but certain instruments make it harder than others, and I would say piano is a pretty hard one.