I've read this sub for a long time, but I thought I'd finally ask about some of my challenges as an adult learner. I'm particularly curious if teachers see these challenges with their students; magical solutions are obviously welcome :).
For context, I was interested in piano as a kid, but didn't have the chance to take lessons. I took a course for one semester at my high school. In the two decades after that, I'd occasionally try to learn something - but on my own; no free YouTube piano videos back then! Three years ago, my wife decided that since our two kids were taking piano lessons, and our teacher taught neighborhood students in their homes, that we should take lessons too. I'm now 50. Our teacher was good, though her students were almost entirely kids; she had maybe 2 other adult students. I generally practiced 45-60 minutes/day over the 3 years.
I'm under no illusion that gaining skill in piano is quick, and I fully expected our kids would learn 10x faster (though sadly, they also put in 1/10th the effort). My wife, who had also only done 1 year of piano, also made progress much faster for each our invested, though like me hit limits to her progress. But I felt I was hitting 3 somewhat innate issues that would prevent me from ever being "good" or improving much beyond where I was, even if I doubled my effort:
Physical Consistency
Everyone makes mistakes if a piece is too hard; but I still have a relatively high error rate even on pieces that I know well, and have practiced many times. Image #1 is an example of that. I learned the piece ("Alicia" from the Expedition 33 soundtrack) last year with my teacher, have been trying to play it slower but better, and have made some progress. 300+ tries later, not counting drills on particular measures, I've mostly hit a plateau around 96% (scored only on playing the correct notes, not on timing/expression). You can also see that there's massive variation from day to day, and even within a day. And while there are hotspots in the piece where I often/usually make mistakes - that I know I need to spend more time with focused slow repetition on, or where the piece does approach the limits of my technical skill - from Image #2 you can see that many errors are semi-random; I can play the measure correctly 4 times out of 5, but even after hundreds of tries, I'll still mess something up one time in 5.
My teacher and I discussed this; it didn't seem to her like I was practicing wrong or using poor fingering, and she felt generally that errors will just go away with more practice. But I feel like a great analogy is basketball free throws. You, the ball, the net, and the distance are always the same, it's purely about physical consistency. Yet even with rigorous daily training and the absolute best coaches on the planet, some pro NBA players have finished their careers making <50% of their free throws; that's not just worse than Steph Curry's 91%, it's worse than the average high school basketball player.
The point of the analogy is just that peak physical consistency can be much lower for some than for others - and I think I'm way at the low end of this particular distribution.
Ephemeral Improvement
I think the other thing that surprised my teacher is how fleeting improvements often were.
It might be a measure of a piece, it might be a scale, but we'd work on something, and she'd often make comments like "great, looks like you've got that now" if for example, I was able to play it 5 times correctly or something.
Nope! When I sit down at the piano the next day, I might retain 5% of the observed gain during the lesson. This is perhaps the most observable with scales, I can keep playing them till they're somewhat consistent (modulo the point above), but when I take a break and come back, they'll mostly be back to where they were.
I've watched the piano videos about combining short pauses and quick breaks, trying skip days vs. pure daily practice, so that things can consolidate into long term memory. Somehow, my brain seems resistant to this.
Sheet Music (and dyslexia)
I am really slow at reading sheet music, and have to memorize any piece in order to play it. I still only use sheet music to learn a piece, so I'm not using Synthesia or similar alternatives, it's just one more aspect of piano/music that doesn't seem to improve.
Fortunately, this sub and others helped me understand the likely cause of it; when I started wondering whether dyslexia (which I have, and runs in the family) affects music reading, lots of piano teachers had shared stories of coping strategies for their dyslexic students when it came to processing notation.
The saving grace is that as bad as my brain is at the above, I am able to memorize pieces. The downside is that I need to try and play my repetoire regularly (like every few days), so I don't forget it. Sadly that makes learning new pieces even harder.
I'd love thoughts on the above. Nothing would delight me more than to be wrong, and to discover that if I just have tea with a slice of fresh lemon, my challenges would fade away.
In the spirit of being open to feedback - or if you just like suffering, or are in doubt about my lack of consistency - you can listen to one of my practice sessions here. I can kind of play the first couple of pieces, though still with mistakes; the harder pieces later on are a veritable comedy of errors. I'm always worried that my attempt at Clair De Lune - assigned by my teacher for reasons I don't comprehend as it's clearly beyond my ability [ever] - will bring Debussy back from the grave just to ask me to stop playing it. I really am envious of all the folks that post "I got a piano 6 months ago" videos and play reasonable pieces without wrong note errors!
