by Heather Baldwin, March, 2022

A couple months ago, I opened my mailbox to find a slick flyer advertising a course that promised to teach attendees to play the piano in just a few short hours. The pitch was this: according to the flyer, chords are key to playing piano, so the instructor would teach you a few chords and – voila! You’d be playing your favorite songs that day!

Normally, these pitches wind up in my recycling bin, but this one gave me an idea: I had an adult student who was struggling to grasp chords and I wondered if maybe a two-hour class and a $20 investment might unlock something for her that I hadn’t been able to. I’d always been curious about what these courses were teaching anyway, so I passed the flyer to Teresa, a delightful, tenacious student in her early 70s whose mantra for retirement is, “I’d rather be bad at piano than good at bingo.” Teresa decided on the spot she would sign up for the class and would report her findings back to me. 

In Part 1 of this post, I addressed a question a student once asked me about how Erroll Garner and other musical giants learn to play piano without lessons. My answer spoke to both the question that was asked and the one that was unasked: Is there an easier way to learn piano? At its core, that’s what “learn piano in an afternoon”-type courses tug at – our innate human desire to find an easier way. 

I did sincerely hope that the course Teresa attended would give her a lightbulb moment about chords, but my optimism was short-lived. The course turned out to be part instruction and part sales pitch for a $2,000 investment in the instructor’s full range of products (special deal that day only, of course). And even the instruction was a disappointment – it included a handout that looked a little like a placemat with a picture of piano keys and markings showing which notes to press to play a C chord, a G chord and an F chord, the most basic chords for beginning piano students. Teresa’s report: “After showing us some keyboard basics and how to play those three chords, the instructor walked around. He spent about two minutes with me and the gal sitting next to me, but when it became apparent that chords were hard for us, he moved on and spent most of his time with someone else who got it more quickly.” Happily, her time and $20 were not wasted: “I made friends with the girl I sat beside! Today, we still laugh about the scam and the guy’s snake-oil sales pitch.”

The story doesn’t end there. Teresa, it turns out, is a thorough detective. When another, similar course popped up on her radar, she signed up for it and later brought those materials into her lesson with me. While the approach was a little different – this one included a spiral-bound handout, more information on the fundamentals of music and more chords – it was nonetheless ultimately another sales pitch, this time for additional video instruction on YouTube.

The point here isn’t that “learn piano in an afternoon” courses are a bunch of baloney (well, maybe it’s a little of the point . . .) – it’s that even those people who claim to offer a “quicker, easier way” to learn ultimately point their clients to a longer road of extended training to truly reach their goals. Which, after two blog posts, is a very long way of saying that the answer to,  “Is there an easier way to learn piano?” is unfortunately no.