How I plan to learn the piano. In 6 steps.

lurn-pianos.md

HOW I PLAN TO LEARN THE PIANO IN 6 STEPS™

UPDATE: So far, a lot of this is working. I'm noticing slight improvements in math skills, it's opened up mental pathways in my programmer's brain and I am not afraid of a piano any more, I can already pretend I know a few things. (In just 2 weeks mind you)

1. Classical is too hard, you have to repeatedly practice boring crap until you either die or decide you suck… unless you're a prodigy which I'm not.
2. What's easy to learn is a pentatonic scale. Only 5 notes to worry about, they pretty much sound good whichever way you combine them and you can hack some fake jazz, blues, soul, gospel and folk for only 5 notes. Man, that's a bargain!
3. I figure by the time I achieve reasonable comfort with the pentatonic scale in C, I can move on to the next one (D) and the next one until I've got the whole pentatonic alphabet.
4. At this point, I should be happy with my right hand, time to work the left. So I turn off the lights...
5. ...because I'm calmer in the dark and for this one I need patience. This is the only boring crap I'm going to put myself through on this: piano exercises to split my brain in two, learning the "third hand". See, you have 10 fingers not two hands. You have to somehow figure out a way to make your brain agree with that.
6. Speed. Do whatever feels good, whenever you feel like it and just get better and faster at it. Play the same stuff over and over again until you're so sick of it and you have no choice but to learn how to triple that note, detune that chord and shuffle that pattern.

If all else fails, go back to MIDI and suck less than before because now you know your pentatonics.

Learning Material Youtube Playlist http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmBhdfV5kbwGZzaX6UPFA6IhEGwpSJ8bp

Pentatonic scale on piano:

short version: http://www.pianoscales.org/blues.html
longer, maybe later version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_scale

If you practice a scale for a while and start moving up and down along that scale while transitioning between the various representation of that scale, then this article may open up some mental pathways: http://jazzadvice.com/using-permutation-to-create-unlimited-musical-ideas-and-killer-technique/

The gist of it: Use "scales" as a mental reference to what notes you're playing with but do not use a scale as the delimitations of your patterns. Start small (small patterns) and build up. ie: scales != paterns.

Mental Meta: There must be a way to designate a "target seeker" finger per hand and train it's accompanying fingers into seeking nearby chords. I try to think a lot of how Ray Charles or Art Tatum might have approached it. Thus, I close my eyes and try to find the keys I want without ringing the notes. It's hard, I'm always tempted to open my eyes. If I could do the aforementioned, I could close my eyes then only have to seek one note per hand and the chord would follow.