Am I intermediate? Idk lol

I really got got by that middle section. Hopefully it is otherwise somewhat musical. I realized I have not played this enough under the pressure of being watched, so recording some full attempts brought to light a lot of sections I thought I had down. Terribly difficult piece.

I’ve been reading books and slowly teaching myself piano over the course of a couple weeks now. I’ve gotten to the point where I can slowly read some notes on sheet music and have been practicing with small snippets of songs out of my books.

Im currently practicing this little melody out of one my books but im confused as to how you slur the same note in a row like the sheet suggests? It wants me to slur middle C twice. When i googled it, it was suggested that I hit the middle C key lighter on the second note but then another source said to hold the sound for the entire 4 beats. Theres no marking that indicates the damper pedal should be held down either.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Hi everyone,

I've been self-teaching piano for over 2 years and have been working on the first 12 measures of Mozart’s Sonata in C Major (K. 545) for the past 5 months.

Honestly, it feels like I've hit a complete wall. I don't feel my tone or mechanics getting any better, especially on the scale passages and transitions. It feels like I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere.

I tried seeking professional guidance, but I couldn't find a local teacher who met basic standards. The ones I tried kept dodging my specific goals with K. 545, playing carelessly, overusing the sustain pedal to muddy everything, and not even strictly following the score. So I’m back to strictly self-studying.

I’ve attached a short clip of my playing.

• Should I keep pushing through these same 12 bars?
• Should I "reset" and restart my approach from scratch?
• Or is there something fundamental about how I’m practicing that needs to change?

Any honest feedback on my technique or guidance on how to move forward would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I’m 18 and have been playing the piano for about a year. I’ve always been surrounded by excellent musicians, and am now even more surrounded by them because my college doubles as a conservatory. I see these people playing and I want so badly to be able to be like that, but it is frankly too late and trying to catch up just makes me upset. I practice so much and I’m still so goddamn bad. When I play something easy and do it well with emotion for just one second I feel that happiness that I’m chasing and it is then dashed against the rocks the second I try to play something that actually takes skill and try and fail over and over and over and over until I smash the keys and storm off. It hurts so much to be surrounded by people who made better choices with their lives than me and honed the kind of skill I will never have in a million years. My musical hero was making incredible songs when he was 18 because he started practicing music when he was like 10. Even if I did have the potential to one day catch up to him, which I don’t, I would be TWENTY-SIX YEARS OLD BY THE TIME I WAS AS GOOD AS HIM WHEN HE WAS BARELY AN ADULT. I just want to play something cool and beautiful and not so stupid and embarrassing and bad but I can’t

Working on voicing/tone

I know it’s slightly off but the melody has to be recognizable

I resumed playing the piano three years ago and have been practicing for about 10 minutes daily. This pace seems to suit me well. For those of you who are also teaching yourselves piano as adults, what strategies have you used to make practice a habit? I think your way of making schedules and keeping records will be helpful for other self-learners.

The family let me know that the deceased was a big fan of Liszt. What pieces might be appropriate for a funeral? I've done a handful of his Transcendental Etudes and such so it's not a question of technique, and I can sight-read almost anything. The pieces shouldn't be longer than 4-5 minutes.

On my shortlist I have one of the Consolations, Liebestraum no. 3, and Un Sospiro. What else do you think would work? Thanks in advance!

And shorter you don’t have to listen just getting used to sharing

I can’t remember the piece anymore (goldfish memory) and I’m thinking of picking it up again
Some of the notes are messed up

This is just a short section of the piece I’m learning. Maybe I should be farther ahead than this… please critique. And yes I did almost make a mistake 😭

I was wondering if anyone has ever been in the same position as me, and in what ways they managed to overcome it.

I'm an early-advanced mature student, I can learn ABRSM grade 8 repertoire pieces in a few months and learn some diploma level pieces as a challenge. My sight-reading is reasonable. I completed my grade 5 theory, so I can identify the chord changes and I have a basic understanding of functional harmony.

However...I nearly always fail to hear these chord changes when I'm learning a piece. I can hear that the piece is moving somewhere, but lose sense of the 'home' key and when 'tension' has been released. I therefore feel like I have no bearing on the structure or journey of a piece which I think would speed up my learning.

I am bad at identifying cadences unless they are in super obvious root positions or cliche sounding etc. It's like I have no intuition for the harmony and can only identify it when I sit down and focus on analysing and writing the chord names over the top of the bar, but then it just becomes more like a puzzle of distinguishing between the passing and chord tones than really helping me understand the music. The chord names I write down just get ignored eventually.

If I play a I-IV-V-I in root position, I can hear what it is by following the bass, however as soon as inversions are used, the harmony just turns into mush to my ear. It's like I am missing the link between the formulaic on-paper analysis and actually hearing it.

I've been discussing this with my teacher, but I think he finds it hard to teach because he learnt how to hear this stuff at a very young age, so he just has a fully baked in intuition. He'll say "Can you hear it resolve?" or "Focus on the journey, tension and cadences in the piece" or "Just listen carefully to what you are playing" and I'm often just sat there confused and frustrated.

I feel like this gap in my skills is probably holding me back from getting to a more advanced level and learning pieces more quickly.

Can anyone relate to this or been in a similar position? How did you get out of it?

TL;DR - I'm terrible at identifying the harmony in the pieces I'm learning, and need some help building that skill.

So I have a former friend of mine that plays piano and guitar. He actually gets paid by the city that he lives in and adjacent City to play at farmers markets and stuff like that and I'm wondering what skill set you need to get gigs like that.

Ive been playing since i was young, classically trained. I can read a leadsheet but i often feel i dont do "enough" to be able to get gigs like that... I'm trying to figure out what skill set I should work on and what I would need to have in place in order to be able to get gigs on the side . Anyone has any suggestions?

i have my first performance coming up next month, after restarting piano this year. just to give some background, i played piano when i was very young but quit for around 5 years. In total i have about 6 years of experience playing but very limited serious performance experience. I practice at home on an upright piano, and when i go to my lessons it feels like all my control of dynamics and tone goes away, i frequently get ghost notes when playing p to pp because of how much heavier the action on a grand piano is. Its much harder for me to create variation in dynamics on a grand piano whereas my upright piano feels much more sensitive to playing loud and soft notes. The sustain and una corda pedals also work very differently which i feel disrupts my sound. Is there any advice for how i can adapt my playing to a grand piano to better prepare for my performance?

Recently I bought a digital piano (DGX-660) to replace my old PSR keyboard (PSR-650) since I'm probably at a point where I'd need to play with 88 keys instead of 61. The PSR was pretty old, it was bought when I was a kid but I didn't continue learning it until a few years ago. Now that I'm playing with a digital piano it seems like I have a huge problem with my touch on the keys. I'm lacking control on how hard I'm pressing the keys, so are there practice suggestions on how to fix this?

Hi, I'm a 27-year-old adult beginner. I’m looking to upgrade from my Yamaha NP-11 to my first proper 88-key weighted digital piano, and I’m currently leaning towards the Roland FP-40.

I started learning piano in April this year, take weekly lessons, practise consistently, and work on sight-reading, theory, phrasing and repertoire as well as songs I like. My teacher has been really pleased with my progress so far. He was especially impressed with my recent work on In My Place by Coldplay and has started giving me more theory because he thinks I pick it up well. Piano has become my biggest passion, and I've taken to it a bit like a duck to water.

Long term, I want to become as good as I can, and we're planning to start some classical training in 2027. I'd love to eventually perform and play with other musicians, so I want something I can grow into rather than feel the need to replace quickly, but my budget is a max of £800.

I’ve already tried a few models:

• Kawai ES120 - very easy and fluid to play, and I could play fast really comfortably, but the action felt a little light to me.
• Yamaha P-225 - probably my least favourite. I just didn’t get on with the key feel and it felt surprisingly cheap to me for the price.
• Roland FP-30X/FP-40 - I preferred the more substantial, controlled feel of the Roland action, and the FP-40 is the one I’m currently most interested in. I felt like the FP-40 had a nicer sound than the FP-30x.

Has anyone here owned or spent much time with the FP-40? I actually played it on the day it launched, but I don't want to get distracted by the shiny new product. I'm also worried about the Roland action for classical playing? I know it's heavier than the ES120.

So I am asking: have you found the action, sound and general experience over time?

I currently live with my dad and probably will for a while, as my mum recently passed away and I want to spend some time with him. I’m planning to move to London eventually, though, so an acoustic piano isn't really practical for me at the moment (and my dad definitely isn't letting me put one in the house lol, and my teacher actually found me a lovely free upright recently, but sadly we just don't have the space).

I’d also be really interested in any other digital pianos around £650–£800 that you think I should try before buying.

I’m going to test the FP-40 again properly before making a decision, so I’m mainly looking for for real world owner/player experiences rather than just specs. Thanks!

I’ve been learning piano using fabers and it’s mostly classical, which i don’t mind but i really love jazz. are there books for learning jazz specifically or? do i just find jazz songs at my level and start learning them?

I understand there’s a strong tradition of performing classical music as written, but I’m curious if anyone has insight about strict adherence to repeats. I know in Beethoven’s first sonata, most people don’t play the repeat of the development and recapitulation because it feels insane, for instance.

The piece I’m curious about in particular is Mozart’s 11th sonata; repeating the variations in the Andante grazioso feels sane, but then there’s the Minuet, where you’d be playing every passage of it four times if you adhere to the score - do people actually do that or is it more fast and loose?

I probably need constructive criticism, yes, i need feedback. I am recording my piano grade 8 next week, but i am still a little nervous / unsure about my own skills

Some context:
The last grade i had was grade 6, in 2019 (if i remember correctly) i took quite a long break due to life commitments, and last year i finally come back to piano, cus it is my everything. It is probably the only skill i have. I then signed up for private tutoring, and have since been working on my pieces. I have quite a bit of incident 3 months ago in august, where i had to do a surgery on my left forearm. It is stated as fascia exposed but not breached. (Orthopaedic says “you are free to go. You can play your piano no problem”)I did not touch the piano at all for those 2 months.

One of the pieces i am doing is bach partita bvw826 sarabande and rondeaux. The rondeaux is quite a fast pace, and sometimes the fourth finger on my left hand slips a lil… i guess it isn’t completely healed.

I do want to heal faster, and also correct my finger techniques etc. an example is for some reason when i do octaves my fingers curl upwards. But im not sure if it is something wrong, but that to me is unsightly…

Any feedbacks/words of advice or encouragement please let me hear it.

Ps. I have depression because things happen, and piano is all that i have. And i love it alot. It might even get me out of depression

I am looking at Brahm’s Klavierstucke HN564. However my local shop does not have any instock yet. There is also the individual books for Op76, 116,117,118,119. Im thinking if i should get the individual books or wait for the stock. Im scared of ultra thick books that dont sit still (2cm is like the max for me)