I am of the opinion that if you want to learn to play the piano, your very best choice is to get a piano teacher. Yes, you can choose to use an online platform to learn to play the piano. Even though I don’t like their marketing tactics at all, I have no doubts that most of them do what they are designed to do, which is to teach you one style of playing the piano. The biggest disadvantage they have is that they cannot give you personalized feedback that a piano teacher can give you.
I have mentioned before that piano teachers are not like the piano teachers when we were young. They are not dictatorial, but have evolved into teachers that can tailor their way of teaching to each student and that they are encouraging and interested in building a student’s confidence as well as their knowledge.
Due to the Covid pandemic and the isolation rules that many countries enforced, piano teachers along with other instrumental teachers got creative about how they could still teach. The result is that many teachers ended up teaching through platforms like Zoom and Skype. I certainly did. The great thing about this is that it has become a normal way of teaching and not just for a few teachers but for the vast majority of teachers. Actually, I can’t think of anyone I know that hasn’t taught online and who would refuse to teach in this manner.
The real benefit is that piano students are no longer stuck with having to choose a local teacher. It probably doesn’t matter that much if you live in a sizeable city, but to people who live in rural and remote areas it would give them a huge amount of choice of teacher, when there was previously either not much or no choice at all.
Regardless of where you live, you can find a piano teacher that would suit you and what you want to learn to play, because of the internet. Think about it for a moment, you could be someone who lives in the UK that wants to have piano lessons in Arabic because that is the person’s first language. You could choose a piano teacher that really suited you as an individual. You could even organize for piano lessons at 4am if you wished, because somewhere in the world it would be daytime. These are but two random examples.
Piano teachers were often seen as stuck with antiquated and unproductive teaching practices and this stereotype would not be considered unfair, but fortunately piano teachers have updated their practices and are keen to keep updating their teaching skills. This also means that probably most piano teachers are happy to teach online and you don’t even have to live in the same country as them.
So in considering which way you would like to learn, do consider the possibility of using a piano teacher that is not necessarily local to you, so you can find a piano teacher who is perfect for you.