Today I’m going to go through the “Age Perception Fallacy” and whether or not you can learn piano as an adult EVEN IF you had no experience as a kid. Then, I’m going to let you know about the three keys to succeeding at piano as an adult and what separates those who make it from those who don’t.
Can you learn piano as an adult?
The answer is 100% yes and you can actually learn faster than kids!
I know that sounds weird, you’ve probably heard things about kids making “magical connections in their brains” or other reasons why they learn faster, but I can tell you from my experience working with over 100 students, that some of my fastest learners are retired people! That’s right, people 65 or 70 years old have been some of the quickest at picking up piano.
It doesn’t matter how old you are – you can absolutely learn how to play piano.
The Age Perception Fallacy
This honestly makes me kind of mad. You know why? Because a lot of adults quit simply due to this perception of not being able to learn as well because they’re not a kid anymore.
Imagine this situation. You go to a family gathering, and let’s say you’re 35 years old and have been playing piano for a year and a half. You sit down and see your 12-year-old nephew. He sits down at the piano and frickin’ kills it. He’s way better than you are and you think “Man, this 12-year-old kid is better than me.” But let’s think about this for a second.
This 12-year-old actually started playing piano when he was 5-years-old! Even though you’re older from an age perspective, he’s older in piano years – the number of years he’s practiced piano. And you know what? The number of years practiced is a MUCH better indicator for how good you’ll be than the physical age.
Even thinking about Mozart, a lot of people think he was this genius with all this piano ability, but if you look at different accounts, his dad basically locked him in a room for 14 hours per day to practice when he was really young. By the time he was 8-years-old, he had as much practice as someone who was 25 or 30.
Alright, now that you have an understanding of the age perception fallacy I want to talk about the three key things that separate the people who make it in piano as adults and the people who don’t.
Key #1 – Practice Consistently at the Same Time Every Day
This sounds obvious, I know, but you need to practice piano consistently at the same time every day to really improve. You’re probably thinking, “Okay, yea, every day I’m probably going to practice,” but that’s not good enough!
You have to realize that as a kid, your parents would put pressure on you to practice. Maybe they’d make you practice piano before you could hang with your friends. Of course, you wanted to hang out with your friends, so you practiced. They had a protocol, involving their parent, that was designed to keep them practicing.
As an adult trying to learn to play piano, you don’t have that. Unless you somehow have your mom calling you everyday at 3:00 to practice. So, you have to create some kind of protocol that will keep you consistent.
Take out your smartphone and set an alert everyday in your calendar to remind you to practice. This could be as little as 15 minutes per day, but it’s important that you commit to it. Don’t have a smartphone? Use an old-school alarm clock, put it on your piano, and set it for the same time every day.
This one thing alone, setting a reminder to practice, is what separates people. It’s not just about saying you’ll practice everyday, it’s about setting an alert or timer that ensures you’ll practice every day.
Key #2 – VERY Specific, Detailed Practice Sessions
One of your big advantages as an adult is that you have the capacity to understand the structure of practicing and how to set goals.
It’s not good enough to walk into your piano session and think, “I guess I’ll practice my scales a little bit and work on my pieces.” That’s good enough to make slow, incremental progress, but if you want to ramp up that learning curve and make progress much quicker, you have to have very detailed practice sessions. Detailed practice is how you hit “Leverage Points” to increase your results per minute of practice.
For these detailed practice sessions you want each minute accounted for. Maybe you start with the first 10 minutes working on scales, the next 3 minutes playing with just your left hand, and then the last 4 minutes you’re playing hands together. Have a detailed plan in place for each practice session so you can make fast progress.
An in-depth explanation of this is in my free course, Become a Piano Superhuman, and you can go to the section on “Goal Setting and Song Mapping” to get protocols for how to practice more efficiently.
Key #3 – Learn the Style You’re Genuinely Interested In
The first two keys are definitely the most important for learning piano as an adult, but this last one is still valuable for motivation as well.
Think about your goals, what you really want to get out of piano, the style of piano you want to learn, and just learn that. There’s this myth out there that you have to learn classical piano first, but this simply isn’t true.
What happens when you’re starting kids with piano is they have no idea what type of music they want to learn. So what we do is take them down a classical path, because learning a classical technique can often translate to different kinds of music.
However, if you’re an adult, with a specific reason for learning piano, maybe to play jazz at a lounge, play at your church, or even just to play a cool song like Don’t Stop Believin’, focus on that. You don’t have to learn classical first.
To stay motivated, you really want to make sure you pick music you’ll actually enjoy. So, pick whatever you want to learn and really focus on that.
Remember, if you want the in-depth, nuts and bolts of how to play piano I have a free course called Become a Piano Superhuman.