Jonas Derksen

How can I start playing the piano?

Many people Jonas met who want to learn the piano fail because of 2 questions. The first question they ask themselves is, "Can I afford a good piano teacher? You can only learn piano if you have a good teacher." The second question is, do you have to learn to read music to learn piano? 

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3 things that Jonas emphasizes again and again are the following:

(1) Motivation: Why do you want to learn piano?

(2) Patience: It's the small advances that you don't see at first, but that bring you closer to your goals

(3) Practice practice practice: "Practice makes perfect!" What a boring phrase with so much truth in it. Did you know that every professional musician invests at least 10 thousand hours of music making and practicing before they reach the level of a professional musician? So in other words, if someone practiced 2 hours a day for 365 days, it would take them 13.7 years to turn pro.

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Jonas has been playing the piano for 16 years now and started learning the piano with Youtube tutorials. You heard right, Jonas taught himself over 100 songs on piano for free with "How To Play..." Youtube Tutorials. There is now a new learning method on YouTube which is "synthesis" is called. With this you can learn the finger combinations of the songs (melody and rhythm) very well. In addition, there are now also very good YouTube teachers who have made it their life's work, people learn the piano onyoutube  (e.g. Thomas Forschbach from werdmusiker.de).

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To answer the second question, you don't need to learn how to read music to learn the piano. Sheet music is the universal language of music. There are different learner types of people and it turns out that many people are very impatient to learn a new language. The new language "read music" requires a lot of time and patience. There are different clefs and with piano there are two (1) treble clefs and (2) bass clefs. That can be frustrating. If you just got the treble clef on it, then the bass clef comes along and makes you livid. 

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Playing the piano is fun once you start celebrating your first successes. That means you learn to play a new song and you can proudly show it to the people around you. Jonas was able to tame his emotions by playing the piano, transforming negative feelings such as loss, hate, sadness and frustration into feelings of hope. That is what drives him to bring people closer to playing the piano, to put broken things back together.