Zach Evans is the person responsible for the YouTube channel Become a Piano Superhuman. I must admit when I stumbled across this YouTube channel, I was intrigued, so I watched the video entitled How to Play the Piano: Day 1 – EASY First Lesson for Beginners.
I must admit that I was not impressed at the beginning because the presenter seemed to talk way too fast explaining what the notes on the piano are. Fundamentally, I agree that learning what the notes on the piano are called is simple and straightforward, however it does take some time for a person to become familiar with what each note is called and how to find the right note quickly. Even the very gifted piano students I have taught, have needed several weeks to really internalize where to find what note on the piano.
Following this was some explanation of a couple of chords. What he covered was not inaccurate at all, but I found it so uninspiring that I literally dozed off while watching the video. It was unappealing to me. However, what might seem uninteresting to one person, might be the best explanation ever, to another person.
Towards the end, he indicated that he had some sort of secret to cut off years of wasted energy in learning to play the piano. He revealed that in his opinion, you should not waste your time lerning to read music. I must say that statements like this I find really irritating. The truth is probably that the presenter probably tried to learn to read music at some point in time and found it very difficult. Some people do find it difficult and other people find it simple enough to learn. The experts think that dysmusia, just like dyscalculia and dyslexia probably does exist – I think its highly likely that dysmusia is real because some people have such difficulty in reading music.
It should also be noted that the presenter said that reading music is only necessary for playing classical music. I disagree because I think it is also essential for playing jazz music. Reading music is not necessary for playing modern, popular music but it certainly can be a help in understanding what the music is doing.
What I also didn’t like was that there was not a sequential group of videos to follow. He does have other videos, but there doesn’t seem to be a structure as to which order would be best for someone wanting to learn from his videos.
While I am not a fan of this YouTube channel, I do acknowledge that there is no false information. I also want to state that this is purely my personal opinion and someone else might find these videos very useful indeed.