My One Year Piano Progress Story - Corinne Plays Piano

I’m now in my fourth year of playing the piano, but I wanted to share my one-year piano progress story. There’s a YouTube video at the bottom if you prefer to watch that!

I started playing the piano in August 2019. My husband bought me a Gear4Music low-end stage piano which cost about £200 and I contacted a local teacher for lessons.

When I was a child, I had keyboard lessons for around 9 years. I had completed grade 6 in electric keyboard in 2004 and stopped when I went to university. I had barely touched it since. I would get sporadic waves of inspiration where I would go through some of my old keyboard sons, and I tried to teach myself piano once or twice but nothing that lasted longer than a week.

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Keyboard Vs Piano

The keyboard is lot different from the piano. With the keyboard, your left-hand plays chords which control a backing sound. The right hand plays the melody. The music just has the treble clef with chord names above it, not two staffs like the piano. So when I came to learn the piano, I found the left hand most difficult to play individual notes and follow the bass clef notation.

After a few lessons and intense practice, I was starting to get the hang of it.

My teacher started me out with some grade 1 and 2 pieces, it wasn’t long before I was working on grade 3 pieces. My keyboard experience helped me get up to this stage pretty quickly but then I plateaued. Being able to read music was also a great help, but I had to learn the bass clef. I felt like I picked this up quickly.

In November I decided to buy a new piano. The first one was always just a starter one to see if I wanted to carry on with the piano lessons long-term. I bought a Yamaha CLP-625. It was an amazing piano and it felt so much better than the cheap one I had before. The touch and feel was much closer to my teacher’s acoustic (A Yamaha baby grand) and I instantly started playing better on her piano as the difference wasn’t so stark.

I played a lot of grade 3 songs before moving on to grade 4, and then grade 5. Although I never wanted to do the exams, I enjoyed using the exam books from Trinity and ABRSM as they gave me some music appropriate for my level and it was satisfying to move up the grades.

I didn’t do any scales really, I had done this all as a child when I had keyboard lessons. As I wasn’t taking exams, my teacher said I didn’t need to do them and suggested I play the scale of the piece I am about to play to keep them up.

My teacher let me lead the way with what I wanted to learn, every so often she would suggest something she thought I would like or would benefit me. I loved that I was able to pick the music I liked.

Piano lessons during Covid

I was having a 30-minute lesson every two weeks until Covid hit. I had one online lesson but then had to cancel my lessons for a few weeks as I was pregnant and suffering from terrible morning sickness. When I got back into my lessons, I started having them weekly during a lockdown. The at-home piano sessions suited me fine as I still felt a bit sick so it felt safer to be in the comfort of my own home.

I also dabbled with some pop songs, Disney and Chopin. I played all the usual songs beginners play, Fur Elise, River Flows in You etc.

I was so motivated and I loved learning new songs. I was practising around 2 hours a day, apart from when I had morning sickness and I had about 4 weeks where I hardly played at all.

I learnt at least 90 songs in my first year! I felt like I was progressing so much and I LOVED playing the piano.

Songs I played in my first year: