PIANO PLAYING PINNACLE

There’s a guy on social media who’s continuously selling a ‘piano masterclass’. You’ve probably skipped his videos at some point - usually the point at which he started shouting about how anyone can learn to play anything with four chords.

It was depressing enough to think that such an obvious snake-oil scam could somehow be everywhere, let alone that people were actually falling for it. It was even worse to find out that it costs $3000, that it really is a load of baloney, and inadvertently… wait for it… funds the Scientologists.

Yeah. You can tell by the way he jumps up and down on his piano lid. There is something Cruisian about it - something totally at odds with the normal function of a musical instrument. He’s totally going to break it one of these days.

The thing I’m most upset about though is that it actually puts people off learning music. He says things like ‘You can learn in a year what took me 15 years, with only three minutes practice a day!’ which is… well… depressing. He goes on to say that music teaching is boring, that it’s all taught in Latin with a thousand hieroglyphics that nobody understands, and that he’s found a way to bypass all of that and turn you into a piano rockstar.

See? Depressing. Where did he learn? In the Vatican? Via the Rosetta Stone? What’s he talking about? And how can you possibly teach anyone to play without even at least a little ‘boring’ music theory? It’s like saying you can learn to read without bothering with the alphabet.

Letters? You don’t need letters. Just feel the words man, let them seep into you. Tosh.

But my biggest deflation is this underlying assumption that you’ll only want to give it three minutes a day. That’s not a good thing - kids ought to want to play and play and play, because they’re loving it.

Is that where we are now? Short attention spans are expected? That’s the default?

He reminds me of someone at school, who’s just discovered how to play chopsticks on the music room piano and now believes that it’s his duty to charge other pupils to learn how to play chopsticks because that - don’t you know - is the absolute pinnacle of piano playing.

What a load of tosh. Save your money. Buy an actual piano. Play it with all the forte or all the piano that instrument will give you, and search (free) YouTube for tips and lessons, or, better still - get a piano teacher who’ll show you scales, teach you theory, maybe even introduce you to some geniuses who never needed to dance about on their own pianos like lunatic chimps.

You’ll be far more inspired, I promise.