Just started, so I need to ask 3 questions

[madsxxphi]

Hi,

I have just started learning how to play the piano, so I have a few questions to ask:
1) When learning something new, I like to measure my progress, so make sure I'm getting better. Any recommendations/ideas on how I can measure my progress when it comes to playing the piano?
3) Any recommendations on a good strategy for learning how to play the piano?
2) I can spend around 10 hours/week playing the piano, so how good can I become in 6/12 months?

Thanks a lot for your help.

- Mads

[gizzy]

The obvious answer is (and I bet you saw this coming) get yourself a teacher.

Some people don't really want to take lessons, some can't afford it, some find it awkward to fit in the time. But you might just find a teacher who is prepared to fit you in on a very sporadic basis, as loing as they know you are working in between whiles. I had an adult I used to do that with, only after a while it seemed that even though he still had a lesson about once a month, not much work had been done in between the lessons, in other words he had rather lost interest.

There does come a time in many teacher-pupil relationships where the teacher stops telling the pupil what to learn and starts each lesson with "well, what have you brought to me today?" This doesn't preclude suggestions, but it means the pupil doesn't need the teacher to "prescribe" a course of treatment.

Find a teacher who suits you - who is prepared to oversee you while you teach yourself, assuming that's what you want. Some will, some won't

Gizzy in Cambridge

[madsxxphi]

I agree that a teacher might be a good idea.

Still, I would love to have a good book to work with most of time, so can anyone recommend a good book to follow/learn from? (for true beginners)

[gizzy]

I don't think you can do better than this, if you really are in the very early stages:
http://pianoadventures.com/publications ... adult.html

There are other courses available (I use the Accelerated Piano Adventures with a lot of older beginners) but I think a lot of the American courses are better overall than their British equivalents. For things like hand position, you could do worse than trawl through YouTube looking for tutorials, of which there are hundreds.

Good luck!

Gizzy in Cambridge

[madsxxphi]

I have the Alfred Albert book to learn from, but a lot of people seems to recommend Accelerated Piano Adventures, so I should probably give that one a chance too.

[jtkavanagh]

I am being filmed for a television reality show involving music (BBC2 so no rubbish) and am using a donated Yamaha P200 full sized 88 key monster to help me.
My method involves one finger and the book Piano for Dummies by Blake Deely.

If you get past the Americanisms and the first three chapters which are a bit 'here is a piano, this is not' it's pretty good.