I know that this is quite a strange concept, the idea that learning to play the piano is a lot like growing your hair. I get that this analogy is not perfect because usually a person’s hair grows automatically where as you don’t learn to play the piano just by waiting, you do actually have to do something, actually quite a lot of that something.
However, here is where the analogy is perfect: If a person is deliberately trying to grow their hair to a longer length than they currently have, then they never see progress from day to day, or week to week and maybe not even month to month (although some will notice the difference from month to month) but enough time will eventually pass that it will become noticeable that the hair is indeed getting longer. Does that mean that the hair wasn’t growing every day? Of course it was growing every day, it just wasn’t noticeable every single day.
Learning to play the piano, especially if you are in the habit of practising every day or almost every single day , you will not notice the improvements that you are making. You might still be getting the timing wrong in a certain passage or you a still playing the wrong note in that hard bar but slowly over time, you are most definitely improving. Each time you practice, you are probably unaware that you are improving in some way. Rest assured you are improving with each practice and with each practice you are slowly moving towards your ultimate goal of learning to play the piano as well as you would like.
So I hope you can see the weird but useful parallel that growing your hair is a lot like learning to play the piano – just because you cannot see the daily progress, doesn’t mean that the daily progress isn’t happening. We know this to be true for growing hair, but as a music teacher of many years, I can assure you that this is also true for learning to play the piano, or any other instrument that you’d like to learn. This is not just my opinion, there are many other music teachers out there that would agree with me.
While we are on the subject of other music teachers, I can’t think of a single music teacher that cannot hear progress from their students who practice regularly, every single week. Just because you can’t always hear the progress that you have made with a week’s worth of music practice, doesn’t mean that your teacher can’t hear it. We definitely do hear it. (On the flip side we can also hear when you have done little to no practice during the week.)
So the bottom line here is that with every practice, regardless of whether you can hear it and regardless of whether you feel annoyed, irritated, overwhelmed, dejected or depressed about your music practice, you are still making progress. As long as you keep practicing with sincere reasonable effort, you will make progress with every practice you do.