Learning Musical Instruments

Why not get a piano and practice scales?

On guitar, it's only if I practiced first :D otherwise it seems to have the opposite effect

I’ve played piano my entire life, but I’ve never learned to play sheet music, and have no interest in it. I play by ear and I mostly improvise. Just mentioning this because sometimes it seems that people think the way you learn to play an instrument is by learning to play a score. No! These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. Even the idea that you could grade how well someone plays seems antithetical to the joy of expressing you

I wish you luck!I also play the saxophone but … the problem with that one is I live in an apartment building with thin walls and can’t, exactly, bang away like I can on a keyboard with headphones. In either case the music reading is useful.My mother, a piano teacher herself, would of course just tell me to do more scales but we can make this better with technology now can’t we.

Learning to play a guitar, and some basic music theory. I wish I had started it earlier, but I guess it is never too late :)

As a boy, my parents had me doing royal conservatory piano. The thing is that I really enjoyed piano, but I didn't want to have to do recitals or exams. Once I was old enough to really say no, I quit lessons. I still play, but it's mostly chording. I have always been pretty good at playing by ear, and even when I was in lessons, I did better mimicking the teacher than I did sight-reading.I still play a bit of piano, but I'm no-where near as good as when I was practicing

Don't be afraid to defy conventional means. When as a kid I (forced by my parents) was learning violin and later piano - I'd throw away the notes and learn to play a piece by ear in a fraction of time. This year I picked up a Taylor and I'm learning fingerstyle. I don't do any boring mechanical practice, I only play songs that I like - it took a while, but watching youtube video note by note I managed to glue together Beatles "Yesterday" and now it actually sounds g

Are you learning 50 min long difficult classical pieces by ear?

I'm 39, and a fairly decent pianist. I learned a bit of guitar when I was younger, but just recently started learning guitar/uke more seriously.I'm keenly aware of the skills that I spent hours and hours practicing that are now second nature to me on keyboards (such as scales, chords, names of notes) that I need to learn for guitar. Intellectually I understand how things work on guitars, but in order to get decent, I need to start putting in the time to practice playing scales,

I took 10 years of piano. I wanted to when I was a child (and I chose the piano).The problem for me has not been the kind of music I had to play. My problem is I only learned to perfectly play a song with sheet paper, by repeating it over and over again in the course of a few months until every tiny little detail was perfect. That's because I was prepared to play in front of a large audience, where you are supposed to play perfectly.What I never learned was how to improvise a somewhat