Learn Piano Online: eLearning Piano Lessons

In addition to traditional face-to-face lessons at a music school, you can also learn piano online. But is eLearning as good as traditional piano lessons?

Of course, you just want to sit down at your piano, digital piano, or keyboard and start hitting the keys. If you’re a beginner with such an intuitive approach, you’re already on the right track. After all, making music is all about emotion. If you prefer a more systematic approach and want to take piano lessons, that’s a good idea, too. And it is common for a mix of the two to be optimal.

There is a lot of information on the internet about learning how to play the piano. On YouTube alone, there are countless video tutorials promising great success. Each one claims to be easy, fun, and quick – and every online teacher seems to have the perfect teaching method. What do you make of that? What is the right way and how much time does it really take to learn how to play the piano online? Here are our tips.

For beginners, advanced, and returning students

By the way, the internet is not just for beginners. Even if you already know how to play but want to hone your skills, you will find plenty of inspiring material. Complete beginners are well advised to take a trial lesson. Many music schools offer this, both offline and online.

First Step: Learning basic musical skills online

The best way to decide on something is to try it out for yourself. Although the traditional way to learn piano is to take lessons at a music school or with a private teacher, this does not necessarily mean that this is the right way for you. However, it must be said that it is generally better to start with a little help and guidance.

Do you need to be able to read sheet music to learn how to play the piano?

The classic preconception: If you want to learn how to play the piano, you have to be able to read sheet music – that’s nonsense! Countless gifted musicians don’t know how to read music. The best way to describe this approach is to call it ‘playing by heart’. While that technically refers to playing from memory, that expression doesn’t quite encompass the meaning of “playing from the heart”.

If you feel like sitting down at the piano and just playing by ear – go for it! This way is just as good as the classical way of taking piano lessons. And the great thing is that one does not exclude the other.

Piano basics on musikmachen.de

While you don’t need any special skills to learn to play the piano, it can’t hurt to have some basic knowledge. You can find a lot of information online. Here are some useful links for your first steps on the keys.

Piano Keyboard Explained For Beginners (Google Translate)

The 5 Biggest Mistakes When Learning How To Play Piano (Google Translate)

How To Sit Correctly On The Piano Bench (Google Translate)

Learn piano without a piano: Online Pianist

While of course hard to imagine, you can also get to know the keys on the keyboard online – just go to the website www.onlinepianist.com. You can use the mouse or computer keyboard to play the virtual keyboard shown there.

The highlight of Online Pianist, however, are the many piano song tutorials. Here you get a visual display of the notes in the form of an animated bar graph (Piano Roll). Hence, you get to see how music is created on the piano in real-time. Some of the demo songs are free, but if you want more, you can create a user account and make your own song lists.

Online Pianist is an English-language site, and the virtual piano keys correspond to the computer keyboard as per the QWERTY system. Overall, the website has an attractive design and is easy to use.

It’s best if you learn to play your first few notes right away. Or download the Piano Tutorial app for iOS or Android and learn to play your first notes on the piano using a tablet or smartphone.

Learn piano online with a real piano

While you can learn the basics online, you will need a real piano to put theory into practice at some point. It doesn’t have to be an actual acoustic piano right away – good digital pianos for beginners are available for less than 500 Euros. If you don’t want to spend too much money to find out if playing the piano is for you, the Roland Go:Piano could be a good solution. The portable piano keyboard is not equipped with the ideal piano keyboard, but it is perfectly adequate for beginners.

It is very affordable and comes with good sounds and convenient features that are useful for online learning. For example, a Bluetooth audio connection lets you play piano lessons and video tutorials through the Go:Piano’s internal speakers or headphone output, making it perfect for playing along.

Using a piano app to learn piano online

Yamaha and Roland in particular have developed special apps for this purpose. The Roland Piano Partner app as well as the Yamaha Smart Pianist app only work with a digital piano from the respective manufacturer. These apps are designed to complement the pianos: they make use of the existing functions while simultaneously adding more. There are learning functions, etudes and sonatas with automated notation and accompaniments to play along to, or beginner exercises to learn sheet music.

The piano apps also make controlling a digital piano even more transparent and convenient. For instance, you can easily edit and configure sounds and effects via the touchscreen. This is definitely a plus, as the apps are offered free of charge by the manufacturers.

Some piano apps also come in the form of learning platforms. These apps, such as Simply Piano, can be helpful and fun – and the entertainment factor should not be underestimated. However, whether you can and should learn to play the piano with them is questionable. An exchange of experiences on this topic on reddit is interesting and worth reading: Shortcomings of Piano apps

Learn to play the piano on your PC with Synthesia

Synthesia has become incredibly popular on the Internet and could be described as a universal language for learning to play the piano – completely without sheet music. Similar to the Piano Roll display in Online Pianist, you can see how, when, and for how long the notes hit the virtual piano keys.

How does Synthesia help you learn?

Synthesia is a sequencer that displays music visually and acoustically. Knowledge of musical notation is not required, neither is it taught here. One advantage when learning how to play is that you can reduce the speed and practice the piano piece slowly, note by note, and then increase the tempo according to your ability.

Synthesia will play any MIDI file. However, you can also buy songs from the Synthesia Music Store. The songs are rated by difficulty and cost between 1 and 3 Euros.

As an autodidactic piano learning software, Synthesia is super simple and self-explanatory. Countless demos on YouTube use Synthesia to show how to play popular and well-known pieces. I would like to mention these two points as shortcomings:

1. The pieces unfortunately sound very machine-like – however, it’s sufficient to practice the finger movements.
2. You have to figure out the fingerings yourself, which might be too much for total beginners.

Synthesia is available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android. An additional app is the Synthesia Video Creator (Mac/PC), with which you can create your own visualized songs as video tutorials for publishing.

https://www.synthesiagame.com

Piano tutorials by MuseScore

MuseScore is a free sheet music software for PC and Mac. In addition to the software, there is also a (paid) sheet music archive on the website. However, the piano tutorials are the best part. These are free and displayed by a visual player similar to Synthesia.

More information on the MuseScore website.

YouTube tutorials to learn piano online

If you search for “how to play the piano” on YouTube, you will find tutorials by Thomas Forschbach from werdemusiker.de. In his videos, he shows you how to play certain pieces step by step – including, of course, the absolute classics from Amelie to The River Flows In Me.

Thomas Forschbach caused quite a stir with his “Learn to play the piano in 10 minutes” tutorial, and the power course was even put to the test in a TV report (Welt der Wunder).

Forschbach uses a little trick in his online course. It is probably the easiest way to intuitively play something that sounds good without any previous knowledge. And it doesn’t even take 10 minutes, it’s that simple:

You play the same chord (in this case C major) with your right hand while the bass goes from C to A to F to G and back to the starting note C. Countless pop songs are based on this harmony change, so the wow effect is guaranteed. Everything is explained step by step in the video – a good start for playing your first notes on a piano keyboard, and fun at the same time.

Learn to play the piano in 8 minutes

If you thought learning to play the piano in 10 minutes was a record, a beginner’s tutorial from the eLearning portal music2me.com (affiliate) does it in 8 minutes! However, the even faster time is not the main attraction of this video, as it conveys a lot of information: You learn the location of the keys on the keyboard, the names of the notes you play, and even basic music notation. Best of all, at the end you can play the world-famous Ode to Joy by Ludwig van Beethoven. The video is professionally made and gives a good insight into this learning platform of an online piano school.

Learn piano online with Joja Wendt

Piano virtuoso Joja Wendt offers the probably most prominent online program. He has been online with Joja’s Piano Academy since 2016 and offers some special features. No knowledge of sheet music is required and the content is presented in an appealing video format. An outstanding feature is the possibility of virtual jam sessions with famous musicians.

You can play the piano part by itself or be accompanied in the virtual rehearsal room by a bassist and drummer or even the Babelsberg Film Orchestra. The course fee is 29 Euros per month. There are also free lessons to try out the platform. You can find more information about Joja’s Piano Academy on the website.

Learn piano online with eLearning portals

As an alternative to classic piano lessons, eLearning portals offer a wide range of possibilities – from learning to play the piano for the first time to practicing well-known and challenging piano pieces for advanced students.

PRO: You decide when you want to start the next lesson and for how long you want to work on it. You can take piano lessons when it suits you and set your own learning pace. eLearning portals are generally cheaper than traditional piano lessons in a music school.

CON: There is no direct help and guidance from a piano teacher. While all portals offer feedback options to ask questions, this is of course not the same as face-to-face lessons. It is worth looking at the details of the offers. The portals offer trial lessons to get to know and try out the learning platform before deciding to pay for the courses.

In addition to basic knowledge, eLearning portals also offer attractive learning material for advanced learners and returning students. Online lessons are generally useful in combination with classic piano lessons, as you can further practice the material you have learned online. Learning to play the piano is an individual matter, and whether you master a difficult passage is not just a question of how hard you practice. This is where traditional piano lessons have a clear advantage.

To the eLearning portals:

www.skoove.com (Affiliate)

music2me.de (Affiliate)

www.flowkey.com (Affiliate)

Useful links on the topic

The Best Beginner Digital Pianos – Test series by PIANOO.com and music2me piano teacher Yacine Khorchi

Best Digital Piano under 500 Euros: E-Pianos for Beginners

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