Learning to play a piece of piano music is hard to pin down because there are just so many factors that have an influence on how long it takes a person to learn to play a piece of music. How frequently someone practices and how long a person has been playing for are two of the biggest factors that can influence how long a person takes to learn a piece of music.
What doesn’t impact is what style of music it is. So many online marketers who are trying to sell their piano course will try and convince you that by buying their course, you will be playing full pieces in a matter of weeks instead of a matter of years. This may or may not be the case.
There also seems to be a popular theory that learning to play the piano through using chords rather than using a traditional method will always be much quicker.
Here’s what I think – you are going to learn to play pieces of music quicker, if it is a piece of music that you have a strong desire to learn. This is the most important factor for determining how quickly you can learn to play a piece of music.
As a piano student, there would be pieces of music that my teacher would set me that would take absolutely months to learn yet there would be times when I learned a piece of music (or most of it) in just a week. The difference was not how easy or hard the piece of music was – the difference was how much I absolutely loved a piece of music. I remember when I was finally advanced enough to handle Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, first movement and my teacher almost presented me with a copy of the music and because it was towards the end of the lesson, there was not much time to go through it, so it was basically up to me to get it started. Within the week, I had learned to the end of that first movement. There were a few wrong notes and the timing was not completely accurate in spots so they needed some tweaking and over the next few weeks I would have gotten it sounding smoother. Realistically, it took a few weeks to learn it well, but only one week to learn to an adequate standard.
This didn’t happen just the one time, there were many times where I was given a piece of music to learn and that there was something that I just really liked about it that I would practice it so much, that I would learn it in one week.
I know it is not just me. I have given my own piano students pieces of music that would almost make their faces light up and that regardless of the level of difficulty, whether it was a little or quite a bit harder. The end result would be that the piece of music would be learned in a week.
So if a piece of music really captures your interest, then you could very well learn it in a week. However, like everyone else there will be pieces of music that you will find challenging and sometimes downright frustrating.
To answer the original question, the biggest factor that determines how long a piece of music will take you to learn, is how much you love a piece of music. Then it is other factors, such as how much you practice and how experienced you are.