I think my piano teacher hates teaching me

Unpopular opinion: not everyone can learn a musical instrument. It’s tricky - the combination of reading music, translating that to your fingers whilst being aware of dynamics, posture, timing etc. It’s not easy.

That doesn’t mean you are one of those people but I think accepting it’s hard, it might not be for you but just chill out and see how you go without the pressure of it being a lifelong dream.

A lot of it is drills. Scales, arpeggios, sight reading practise etc. those basics will help you with the pieces.

Have you looked at YouTube for practise hints etc?

Do you write the note letters on the music? Istr when my son started learning piano he did that for every note at first for quite a few months, then gradually cut down to the ones above and below the main stave lines, then just the odd one in a piece.

You're probably doing much better than you think you are!

Pausing lessons for a few weeks while you work on the basics with an unintimidating app or independently is a suggestion worth considering if you're getting anxious about lessons. I had basic music-reading ability from when I was a child, and set myself targets - completing the OpenLearn course, being able to play a few scales and sequences reliably, getting to grips with playing very easy pieces with two hands, memorising three short pieces - before approaching a teacher. I didn't feel ready to start lessons until a full two months after getting a piano. Don't be afraid to use entry level children's books (there are always plenty on Vinted and the second hand book sites).

Learning how to make the most effective use of practice time is also a skill that isn't necessarily intuitive. Learn Faster, Perform Better by Molly Gebrian is currently in favour as an accessible book on the subject.

I didn't settle with the first teacher I had lessons with because he wasn't proactive about challenging me with pieces I might not have chosen myself and making me learn skills I might have put off repeatedly. The second one has been much better, and asked for a lot of details about my personal history with music before my first lesson.

You always have options of you are paying.

Stop giving him money its not a good fit.
Find a new teacher

Some ideas from a professional pianist and piano teacher:

• Listen to music while following the score (sheet music) along to help you become more fluent associating the sound with the dots.
• Use flashcards to practise note recognition. Sightreading gives you wonderful freedom and independence, able to pick up any piece of music and make sense of it.
• Ask your teacher for practice techniques - HOW should you practise? You could even do a mock practice session in your lesson. So much of learning an instrument in the early stages is learning how to practise.
• Don't use an app. Don't use a keyboard.
• He is a real person! Any number of reasons he might be feeling frustrated unrelated to you. Or maybe he is frustrated with you - use that as fuel to do more, try even harder and make him proud!
• Learning an instrument is constantly striving to do better, do more, stretch yourself as far as you can. Sometimes it's an easy journey, sometimes an absolute slog. Just keep going, don't give up.

OP there is a piano learning app called Simply Piano that I trialled for my son and me, it's brilliant especially if you are finding it hard to remember things.
Persinally i would ditch the teacher and learn using the app and then get the teacher back once you have mastered more of the basics, otherwise the stress of thinking he is frustrated is going to hinder your learning anyway.

If it helps: my mum is a piano teacher and she says pupils tend to be readers or memorisers, and she finds that memorisers tend to catch up on music reading in time but that readers often struggle with memorising.

Not sure how universally true that is but I was always a memoriser and I can read music pretty well now - I actually find the memorising much harder and it worries me! Like I’ve lost a skill!

What about a bit longer between lessons - I remember having a written book so you had to draw in the notes -maybe that helps (this was 60 years ago though😂 )

Piano teacher here. Sounds as if you’re doing fine and your teacher is good. 2 months learning is nothing. Flash cards and note learning apps will help and look at the pattern of the black and white piano keys. Try finding all the cs, all the ds etc.

In three months you don’t get far

but it sounds like you have a stress response - you can’t replicate what you do at home in front of the teacher

a good teacher should be helping you with this - it’s all part of it. They should be expecting this . as should you! But it will get better

and he could be bored cause you are the third beginner of the day and he’s said whatever piano teachers say theee thousand times a week - can you predict this? It often gets a laugh if you preempt and it might just be you haven’t gelled yet - patience - leaning an instrument teaches patience

There will be times when your practice goes well and your skills go up and up, and there will be times when you plateau (and in my experience I also had skill regression). All you need to do is get on that stool and play.

This is very good to hear from a professional pianist@JustOnePersonNotAnOctopus !

I've been learning since the COVID lockdowns after wanting to learn for decades, I had only ever done recorder at school. I was fine with reading simple music but boggled by more complicated stuff. I find the music theory really hard and learn a lot by ear and watching you tube tutorials.

After a couple of years I had a few proper lessons and the teacher seemed quite frustrated with me. He was making me feel very self conscious which of course made me go wrong more 🙄

I think some teachers are so used to getting kids through Grades that is all they can do. I'm not trying to be a professional pianist. For me, I just want to enjoy playing music, I'm not interested in getting Grades. The lessons were taking all the fun out of it and actually making me despise it.

I gave up the lessons after about 6 months and have just been teaching myself since. I can now play a lot of tunes quite well but reading music is still difficult. When I start learning a new tune I have to laboriously work out the notes for where my fingers go, then I scribble some notes on the music at the tricky parts to remind me what to do when I get there. After a while I'm playing mostly from memory so it doesn't matter.

I practice every day and find it very relaxing, I never could get the hang of mindfulness or other meditation but playing music works really well for me 😊

You’ve been learning since Christmas? It sounds like you’re doing fine. Firstly you need to let yourself “get over” being anxious and worrying about mistakes. They are going to happen. I get paid to play and I make a bunch of mistakes. Secondly it sounds like you’re doing some good stuff, make sure you don’t always practice from the beginning that will really help you. Name the notes, don’t look at your fingers, follow the music as you play, read ahead, RELAX!

It sounds like you are a bit oversensitive to his body language (I can be too), and you need to learn not to give a shit. I don’t teach adults any more but they are the worst for performance anxiety issues. If you are enjoying it who cares how many mistakes you make! (who am I kidding though, I hate making mistakes).

Most importantly, if you want to be good at playing an instrument you have to persevere. There will be times when your practice goes well and your skills go up and up, and there will be times when you plateau (and in my experience I also had skill regression). All you need to do is get on that stool and play.

Music lessons teach so many skills. Not just how to play the piano, but discipline, perseverance, performing, not being so sensitive to how we think other people are feeling.

Get a better teacher.

That's so normal!
My daughter is learning and is doing a Gr4 exam soon.
She will also take about ten secs to work out what she's supposed to be playing if I ask her to start mid piece.
I am also a piano player and wind player and it's so so common.

It sounds like you're doing well!

Definitely try the flash cards and simply music, or there's an app called Note Rush (about £6) that can help with note recognition, it's got games you can test yourself with.

Just keep going, practice little and often and try to enjoy it. 😊

Personally, I don’t love the Duolingo course. Worth trying to see if it works for you. If it works great, but if it doesn’t don’t worry that it’s you. It’s probably a personal preference thing.

This is common.

Honestly piano is so hard.

From your updates it sounds like he’s not too bad and you’re projecting your own worry onto him! Maybe he should be more openly encouraging but also a lot of the time it’s better teaching to say less and to let the student process things themselves. So maybe while he’s waiting and there’s an awkward silence, that’s where you’re thinking he’s pissed off?

Given we can only help ourselves, try these things:

Notebook - write down things you’ll forget and every less write down clearly what you need to practise

Do some theory/paperwork to get your working memory as good as your muscle memory

Make yourself practise a section looking into the distance not the keys

Make yourself practise chunks starting from the middle of the piece

Practise scales - honestly helps fluency so much.

Make sure you’re learning things you want to learn.

Studies can be fun - they focus on a skill but sound like a ‘real piece’, so it’s more satisfying.

Chords - is he teaching you chords? Are you interested? If so you can play chords along with the track so again a bit more satisfying and a bit more variation.

Im sure he doesn’t hate you!

It sounds as if you're not lacking in ability - being able to learn by a combination of playing by ear and muscle memory isn't something everyone can do. But learning to read musical notation for the first time in adulthood is really challenging. The Open University has a free OpenLearn Introduction to Music Theory course that it might be worth investigating An introduction to music theory | OpenLearn - Open University It doesn't assume any prior knowledge.

The Duolingo music course, previously mentioned, is also worth a look.

It's also important to cut yourself lots of slack for playing as if you've never seen the piece before when you have to play it with your teacher present. When practising, it's quite common for the first attempt at even a familiar piece to be a bit wobbly, and when you're asked to play in a lesson it's ALWAYS going to be that wobbly first attempt that you're displaying. And that's apart from the effects of performance anxiety, which is very common.

It's possible, as others have said, that this teacher's methods don't work for you and it may be that a different teacher or an online resource would suit you better. If he's the only face to face teacher available to you, though, it would be worth having a conversation and making sure he understands your learning style and isn't working on assumptions based on what has suited other students.

If it’s learning the notes that you’re struggling with, have you tried the music course on Duolingo? I’ve been surprised at how good it is. My son has learned to read music from it really quickly from having zero previous knowledge (or interest!). It teaches a fair bit of musicality too.

Ok, a couple of suggestions.

For remembering the notes: make yourself some flash cards with the stave and notes on one side and the letter on the back. Bass and treble clef. Then keep them round the house and keep flipping them over to help the notes stick in your memory - you can do a bit of a refresher while you're waiting for the kettle to boil for example.

For not being able to start from a random place in the piece: you've identified it's an issue in your lesson, so try and weave that into your practice - ie don't always start from the beginning of the piece when you practice. In fact, starting from the beginning often isn't the best way of practicing anyway - you should be picking out the tricky sections and focussing on those, then when you have them sussed you incorporate them into the piece as a whole. Maybe ask your teacher for practice techniques - or if he's not being helpful there are loads of youtube videos with tips on generally how to get the most out of your practice, and also on specific techniques for breaking down difficult passages.

Good luck, and stick with it!

I play to a pretty good standard and have been playing since I was very young so I read music but I'm pretty reliant on the music (this is more due to anxiety than anything else I think because I can't play with others around). However, a close family member is brilliant at learning by ear or using apps but can't read music at all. You might just need a different approach.

You sound like me OP. I still haven't got the very high and low notes of the piano down and been playing years! I failed my grade 5 piano. The only time I can play anything without mistakes is from total muscle memory. I don't read very well-am short-sighted and even though my glasses are corrected to account for this I still feel at a bit of a disadvantage and like I struggle to read the notes. I think if I'd just memorised the piano pieces for my exam instead I would've aced the test but didn't think to do that at the time. Funnily enough I always did ok at sight-reading, no idea how!

Also with how much else there is to concentrate on like dynamics and feeling, it was too much for me to try so hard to read the notes as well.

There are so many brill musicians out there that don't even know how to read music or know any theory!

Flashcards or an app are going to be your answer here I think. You probably aren’t going to learn them from just playing because of the muscle memory thing.

Start with just a couple of notes in each clef. Shuffle and run through them a couple of times a day. If you get one wrong don’t put it to the back put it behind the front card so it comes up again quickly. At least once a day I would shuffle them, name it and then play the note. Once you are confident add another couple in.

A really basic sight reading book might work too. Could use ‘A dozen a day’ mini book (the pink one) for that or if you don’t mind it being aimed at kids rather than adults piano adventures primer level sight reading book starts with just middle c in treble clef and works from there.

being able to start from the middle of a piece is not an easy skill for a beginner. It does take practice.

Maybe you're like me. I don't play piano, but played clarinet as a teen and now enjoy finding and memorising melodies on the hammered dulcimer. I've had no formal lessons, just watched a few videos on YouTube and started playing by ear. I did learn to read music for clarinet, long ago, but even then preferred to play by ear. If you're determined to read music, I am sure you can, but it may not come as naturally to you as playing by ear does.

Surely teaching music means dealing with beginners, so try not to worry about your teacher. He's being paid for his time, after all.

To be fair, even someone at Grade 8 level can struggle with starting a piece at a random point. Are you sure you're not being too hard on yourself?

I think using music theory apps might be worth a try, but you could also try another teacher who is less focused on sheet music and focus on actual piano playing (and maybe improvisation!) instead. There was a great jazz piano teacher in my school who was great for kids who didn't want to learn from a book. You could ask your current teacher if he could also accommodate this style of learning if there aren't any alternatives in your area and if it is too soon for you to learn purely online