By ET

I did some research about the books people use to learn piano. For beginners, usually the following are the standard books. Hanon, Thompson, Beyer, and Czerny.

I found Hanon to be unrealistic, as it emphasizes pure hand repetitions. This definitely does not work for me. Subconsciously, I would quickly figure out the pattern and just type the pattern without thinking. And this would make it impossible for me to learn the positions of the notes.

Thompson is for very little kids, so I don’t think this is suitable for adults.

Beyer is very interesting, I think it is quite suitable for me. There are 106 pieces, and I can immediately start to play the pieces between 20 to 40. It usually takes about a year for kids to reach the 106^th, I believe it will be faster in my case.

Czerny has a few books, there is one called 599, one 849, one “24 left hand”, etc. For beginners, 599 is suitable. There are 80 (as I remember) pieces. It starts from very simple pieces, and the first half reaches the same level as Beyer. It takes about two years for kids to finish all 80.

There are many other books, for example, I finished reading “Teach Yourself to Play Piano”. It includes a lot of discussions about music theory, which is very good for me to catch up. There is another one called “How to Learn Music by Ears”, and one called “How to Play Popular Piano in 10 Easy Lessons”. I think there can be many of this kind in the library, I, of course, searched them out on the Internet.

By ET This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under Art, General, Life, Music, Play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.