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RicePaddy  ·  3228 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I made a few word clouds of my girlfriend's and my Facebook chat history

I abandoned a lot of online resources because I found it difficult to motivate myself to do scales and drills and whatnot, so I'm afraid I won't be too helpful.

I found in the beginning that using Synthesia videos on YouTube were fairly helpful! When I wanted to learn a piece, I would watch a Synthesia tutorial, write down the notes/chords and then use those as a foundation to build on. The result was I would learn to play a piece by sound using my rudimentary notes as a baseline. This helped me learn to improvise, I think.

It may be a bit unorthodox advice, and someone who was classically trained would shoot me in the face, but I'd say just focus on having fun rather than turning it into an exercise. Learn the scales (or at least be able to figure them out), learn to read notes, learn about chords, and then learn simple pieces that you want to learn.

The only place you'll really need online tutorials is if you're trying to learn music theory. I was lucky enough that they taught it at a pretty basic level in my high school, but there should be some decent videos on YouTube. Here's one that looks good from what I've seen so far!