As I regularly do, I was scrolling through YouTube and I came across this video. To be honest, I found it rather odd. It is labeled as lesson 1, but I could not find lesson 2 anywhere and it is not as if there has not been enough time because lesson 1 was posted about 7 years ago. I also found it odd because most of the YouTube videos on this particular channel are for the electric guitar and bass and while it is perfectly normal to have videos about these instruments, it seems a bit odd to put one classical piano video into the mix.
The video opens with a bloke that has his name and position at a college across the bottom of the screen. I think that this is good because it reflects someone who is knowledgeable – they are not just some random person who is posing as an authority on something, when they clearly have no right to.
I must admit that I have a few issues with this video. The first issue is that teaching the C major scale should be the starting point in learning to play classical piano. I completely disagree with this. I know that it used to be common, but I think it is much better to introduce 3-5 notes in the first lesson and get the students to start reading those notes. If only reading 2 notes is achieveable in the first lesson then that is better than getting new students to play 8 notes without even knowing the names of the notes that they are playing. I think that this piano teacher, because he works at a college and is teaching more advanced students, has probably not taught a first piano lesson to anyone in a very long time.
I have an issue with this piano teacher telling people to flatten their wrists. I must admit when I saw that, I was gobsmacked. I have never taught this way, I have never been told to do this myself and I know of no-one getting their students to flatten out their hand and wrist. Again, probably because his piano students are all very advanced, I believe that he is saying this because when you are an advanced piano player, you sometimes do need to flatten out your hand a bit to get the necessary speed that is required. However, almost all beginners will try and play the piano with wrists that are way too low and they can’t maintain a relaxed hand or wrists and they certainly can’t make the use of their arm to get some weight behind their hand if their wrist is too low.
The last thing that I noticed was that he was actually encouraging small wrist movements while playing the C major scale. This is unnecessary and it will slow you down and add unnecessary tension into your wrists. He might be thinking that this is a good way for a beginner to get the right tone from the piano, but this is not good for the beginner.
To be fair to the presenter, he clearly knows quite a lot about playing the piano, but I am surmising from his errors in the advice he gives, that he has not taught beginners for a very long time – maybe even never! He must be used to teaching advanced piano students and that must be his strength.
Overall, I think that this video, that even though it is less than 6 minutes is a waste of time – don’t even bother.