Long overdue, and I'm not sure if people are following this thread anymore, but here goes!
I started in my freshman year of college. A few months before I joined college, there was this friend of mine who showed me a couple of piano recordings that were amazing.
Prior to that, I had very little knowledge about music. I didn't know what scales were, and I had never heard of chords. But I became obsessed with those piano pieces, and realized I had quite a good "sound memory" for music. Although I had no one else to compare it to and wasn't from a musical family, the entire piece would just start playing in my head, basically from start to finish, as if I were listening to it live. Then, I thought -- it must be possible to translate what you can imagine in your head onto the instrument, as if you were singing it. That it should be possible to eventually learn to transcribe anything, if you can only hear it clearly enough. And so I started playing all of the melodies I knew at that time (mostly pop songs) by ear.
My freshman year of college was very difficult for me. I was almost failing classes, and I realized that I didn't really like my major but couldn't switch out. A friend of mine had a portable 61-key keyboard which he let me borrow, so I would take that to my dorm room, skip all my classes, and play piano for something like 4-6 hours a day when I would get the chance, maybe more. I was obsessed, and would learn themes I liked from songs, play by ear or using synthesia, even attempt to improvise a little, but quite poorly as I had no idea what I was doing. Essentially, I would take an idea and try to build it up, like playing one augmented chord in the left hand and seeing what melodies fit -- that sort of thing.
I really wanted to learn quickly, and kind of properly (although when I started taking lessons I realized that I had missed out on so much). Within the first few months, a guy introduced me to Zimerman's Chopin Ballades -- he had played the Fourth Ballade himself sometime in his childhood. I didn't take to them initially, but over a few months, they really grew on me. And so Zimerman's Ballades and Schubert Impromptus was one of my first exposure to classical music.
I used to follow YouTube channels, masterclasses on YouTube, and C Chang's book on how to learn the piano. His idea of "mental practice" really took with me, and I tried developing an internal ear for music the best I could, and a mental visual keyboard, which I succeeded at. I watched all of Josh Wright's videos, something like 500 of them. Around this point, I started getting into some of the other YouTube arrangers, like The Piano Guys, Animenz and Kyle Landry.
I watched this video series, and he mentions Cziffra's Liszt Grand Galop Chromatique at some point. I listen to it, and am totally blown away.
Then, I listened through much of Cziffra's catalog of recordings. That was my gateway into piano music, and to me he is still the best performer of all time, and has jaw-dropping musical moments.
I wanted to prove a point, and so I taught myself Chopin's Nocturne op 9 no 2, Schubert Impromptu op 90 no 2 and 4, the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody 6 (as best as I could), culminating in (obviously lol) Fantaisie Impromptu!
It's not well played, and got rightfully shat on when I posted it on discussion forums online. But it was still something, and that made me feel like I should really be taking piano more seriously.
This was a point of some soul searching. I loved piano, but there was no way I could audition for a music degree with zero formal training. So I decided to go for a Masters program in computer science, get a piano teacher and really focus hard on getting good. I auditioned for a few piano teachers, and they had relatively mixed opinions, where some were amazed at what I could do and some others were tentative given that I was an adult. I started with a well-regarded teacher who said he would try to build my technique from the ground up.
Whenever teachers would ask me what my plans were with the piano, I would tell them that I wanted to be a concert pianist. Obviously, this was met with some incredulity, but my hope was that it would give teachers the right expectation, that I wanted to be pushed to my limit and progress quickly.
That was a difficult experience. I was playing grade 1 pieces for almost a whole year, trying to train my hands and fingers to work the way my teacher was asking them to. I did get better, but it didn't click completely. After another year, I tried many different things and learned many pieces, but it still wasn't working. My teacher told me that he didn't think I had the talent, or that I had started too late, to try to become a pianist, and reiterated his view that an adult could never do it.
So, I started with another teacher in a last ditch attempt to get somewhere, and that has been the past year. This new teacher believed that hard work was all that mattered, and was essentially a prodigy who started in his teens. That was very much an inspiration for me. He thought it was absolutely possible to get into a degree program within a year or two, and essentially set out a plan. That has really improved my technique and playing ability, and allowed me to make real progress of a kind I have never made before.
... to be continued. (lol)
