Play piano better by... thinking like an athlete! I've just posted a free, open-access article on this over on my Patreon — if you read it, let me know what you think in the comments! 👇
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Folks - I'd be really chuffed if you could tell me what you think about my new approach to YouTube videos. I'm trying to shoot shorter, snappier content that's less heavily edited and uses fewer fancy-pants graphics effects — the recent vid below on my "minute to minute rule" is in the style I'm talking about. Its performance suggests that you like this kind of thing... but I want to get some actual human feedback so I can improve it further. It would also be good know what sort of piano content/style of approach is hitting the spot for you at the moment. If you have time to post a comment below, I'd really appreciate it! watch video on watch page
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I’ve just posted the score for “September Blues” over on my Patreon. It’s an original short piece in three sections (from “quite easy” to “not-so-easy”) that you might like if you’re following my free Piano for Beginners course. I’ll be posting a walkthrough video for it, also on Patreon, next week. If you’re interesting in signing up, we have a really friendly community over there and there’s a ton of exclusive piano learning resources - the link is in my YouTube header.
P.S. Big thanks to those of you who spotted the glitch with the “most recent post” on the landing page - turns out it was displaying a post from weeks ago rather than the actual most recent post. The ever-efficient Patreon support team have now fixed it. I’ve actually posted four times this week…!
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Just a quick reminder for those of you going through my free Piano for Beginners course here on YouTube: a few months ago I published this supplementary lesson. It sits between lessons five and six of the original course, but it should help you anyone who is still in the first half of the the course (and maybe some of you who are a bit beyond that). I contains extra exercises and several specific tips about things I've seen work for people now that the course has been live for nearly a decade. So if you're doing the course, please do take a look! watch video on watch page
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Evening all! There's a new tutorial live now, and you're going to like it if you're working on your pop piano skills. Give it a look and let me know what you think! watch video on watch page
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If you’re following my free Beginners’ Piano Course here on YouTube, you might like this - it’s the first of four supplementary lessons I’d adding to the existing course. This one sits between Lessons 5 and 6 in the playlist, but it will give you an extra boost if you’re anywhere in the first half of the course.
https://youtu.be/DQ4-5GwGUBY
watch video on watch page
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If you like a podcast, have a listen to David Reidy's "Piano, Finally" which is full of great insights and tips based on his experiences as a mature piano learner. It's here on YouTube and all the major podcast syndication platforms (Apple, Spotify etc.). Here's the first episode. Enjoy! watch video on watch page
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Hey everyone! I've been making a few Shorts recently, including this one you might like — quite a funky little improvisation exercise. watch video on watch page
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I've just posted a long article for my Patreon subscribers about the power of failing. It's based on an interview with Jacob Collier over on the Colin and Samir channel, in which (among other stuff) Collier talks about how you can benefit by deliberately setting out to do something badly in order to get your creative flow going. There's an excerpt below, and if you want to read the full thing (~2000 words) just sign up to support me on Patreon (low cost, lots of great content, supportive community) over at www.patreon.com/billhilton - OK, here's the excerpt!
*Failing: the skill at which we're all experts*
...To me, this idea of deliberately creating something bad is fascinating. Jacob was specifically talking about songwriting, but I think his advice can apply to a wide range of musical activities — whether you’re composing, improvising, or learning a written piece. That’s because one of the biggest obstacles to creative growth, and by extension to our progress as musicians, is the voice of our inner critic.
You play something, it doesn’t sound great, and your inner critic immediately says, "that’s no good. Better do something else instead."
You write something, and that same voice says, "this is rubbish. You're nowhere near as good as Paul McCartney or Beethoven." Often that voice is enough to make you give up.
I suspect this is a particular challenge for older musicians and learners. When I was a kid, it felt easy to write a song or sit at the piano and improvise. I wasn’t much good, but equally I didn’t have any kind of reputation to live up to — not to the world at large, nor in my own head. I could play around freely, improvise how I liked and write what I wanted. And yes, a lot of it was utter rubbish. But some of it wasn’t. I learned to keep the good bits and bin the rest.
Fast forward to now, the early days of my sixth decade, and I find it all so much harder. I still compose and improvise, but it feels like more of a struggle. Why? Because that inner critic is better-informed. It’s more aware of what success looks like. It’s more conscious of what other people might think. A much remarked-upon phenomenon is that creative people — from mathematicians to poets — often produce their best work when they’re young. I guess part of that is a result of older brains slowing down (especially for the maths people, perhaps?). But how much of it is because, as they’ve aged, they’ve become hyper-sensitised to the risk of underperformance? Have their inner critics just become too discerning?
That’s why an exercise that sounds silly — deliberately setting out to do something badly — has the potential to be liberating.
I’ve been experimenting with this approach for the past few days on a couple of projects. The first is an improvisation: a 16-bar chord progression in D minor that I’m practising for a YouTube tutorial. It’s in a soul-meets-contemporary-jazz kind of style, and I plan to use it to demonstrate the huge range of sounds that can be created with chord extensions. When I first played it through, I thought, crikey, I really sound nothing like Stevie Wonder. But by giving myself permission to sound bad, I've made progress. I’ve ground through the progression 230 times so far, making an effort not to worry about the quality. In fact — as Jacob Collier's principle suggests — I've embraced the disjointedness, the clichés, the poor musical logic. And failing seems to be working. Ploughing through all that bad playing has mostly just been… bad, but it’s built my fluency with the progression and a few interesting ideas have popped out.
So I’ve taken a project that I might have become demoralised about (and consequently shelved) and used conscious failure to help me make progress.
The second project is a composition. I’m working on a short piano piece that I plan to orchestrate as part of a longer-term effort to improve my skills in that area. Last night, I was messing around with it and thought, this is awful. So today I sat down and gave myself a challenge: to compose up to the end of bar 32 and not worry if it’s complete junk. In fact, to go down the Collier route and try to compose something downright bad. What I ended up writing was indeed pretty excruciating, but in the process of just getting stuff down, entirely careless of its quality, I came up with a couple of ideas I can probably recycle later. By setting out to fail — by saying to my inner critic, "clear off for half an hour, you’re not needed here" — I inadvertently set myself on the path to, well, perhaps not to success, exactly, but to creating something that has some value.
I don't want to paint the inner critic as a pure villain, by the way. At the editing and refining stages of the creative process its presence is critical ("choose this phrase or this phrase? This chord or that chord? Do I really need this bit?"). But when you're thrashing out the first draft, you need it to be quiet, or at least to be measured and tactful in its criticisms.
Now, many of you in this community are relatively new to piano. So let's think about how this technique of setting out to fail can work for you...
Like I said, to read more and also access a ton of other great benefits, head over to www.patreon.com/billhilton — I'll be really glad to see you over there!
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Morning everyone! I know a lot of you follow my beginners' piano course, and right now I'm planning to shoot two or three new videos and drop them into the playlist. The theme will be "review and reinforce", and each one will include tips based on what I've learned from talking to people going through the course, plus some extra exercises and stuff to do.
I'm going to slot the first one in probably between lessons 5 and 6. Here's the question: if you're going through the course, or have been through it, what could I include in these top-up tutorials that you'd find useful?
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Piano, improvisation, chords, music theory and more!
Most of my videos are piano tutorials. I have a series of 21 tutorials on how to play piano for beginners, and dozens of other tutorials you'll find useful if you're a pianist who already has some basic skills and you want to move outwards into areas like improvisation, jazz piano, blues piano, rock and pop piano, songwriting and more.
I also have quite a few tutorials on music theory, chords, songwriting and composition and related areas if you're trying to improve your overall musical skills.
If you have any questions about anything piano or music theory-related, or suggestions for tutorials you'd like to see, give me a shout!
2 June 2008