Yeah, I cringed a little bit when the clouds generated and those came up. I say "like" so much I'd put any teenage girl to shame. And well spotted! We actually met at a youth community workshop kind of thing. Basically, all us kids would turn up and choose between a sport/music/dance/drama workshop. We had both chosen music and were the only two doing the piano workshop. I had only just began to get serious about learning piano, and she's always been really passionate about it. We exchanged a lot of videos and piano pieces in the first couple of weeks!
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!
Very helpful, thank you. Music theory sounds interesting to me, a while back I made a 'song generator' which really just put a couple of notes together that sounded good, repeated those notes again and generated a new set. The fact I'm calling these "A couple of notes together that sounded good" shows that I need to learn some Music Theory haha. I will start with the Fringe theme tune. Or is that a little too difficult?
That's awesome, how did you manage to figure out which notes would work well together? If you've been playing piano for a while, but haven't taken lessons, chances are you actually know more music theory than you realize. I was working under the assumption you were still at a pretty basic level. How long have you been playing the piano for? It's a beautiful piece, but if you're unfamiliar with the piano, you might find it difficult. Even though there's a lot of repetition, if your fingers aren't dexterous it'll definitely be a challenge. One of the first pieces I learned was this one. If you can already play a few pieces at that level, you could try moving on to something that takes more co-ordination. When I was trying to build up some finger dexterity, I moved on to this one and the odd reel or slip jig. If you've already got some experience with songs at that kind of level, then I don't see why you can't give Fringe a go. It sounds challenging, but if you like the song it's huge motivation.
I'm very curious about these things, I just paid attention to what sounds good to me and what doesn't and found the differences. Songs I like tend to have evolving patterns, challanging me to guess what comes next so I can feel clever when I do, each time the notes or rhythm change, they change based off some 'rule' so I can predict what's going to happen with some difficulty. Sometimes the rule changes too, and there are rules about rule changing etc. No idea why I still like some songs I've heard a million times though, I'm guessing there are several elements to music that people enjoy. how did you manage to figure out which notes would work well together?