Learning Piano as an Adult: Six Years In, Here’s What I Actually Think

In 2019, I wrote a very short, very excited blog post about booking a piano teacher and invested in a piano with weighted keys. I was thrilled. I had a surge of motivation to work really hard to learn piano as fast as possible!

Six years later, I’m still playing. And I have a lot more to say about it than I did then.

The Backstory

I didn’t come to piano as a complete beginner. I had keyboard lessons as a child — ten years of them, working towards my grade 8 exam before I went to university and, as tends to happen, left it all behind. Between then and my late thirties, I played here and there, taught myself a few songs, but nothing really stuck. The problem was always my left hand. It had spent a decade playing chords rather than proper bass clef notes, and trying to self-teach proper piano technique on top of that, muscle memory was difficult in the left hand.

A keyboard differs from a piano in that you play the melody with your right hand and the chords with your left hand. The music is just one staff in treble clef (mostly) with the chords written above. In piano, you play notes in both hands with two staves of music. Usually, the left hand plays in the bass clef and the right hand plays in the treble clef with the notes written on the staff.

So in 2019, I did what I probably should have done years earlier: I got a teacher.

I didn’t use an app or YouTube tutorials. I had an actual human piano teacher. I would go to her house and have my lessons on her Yamaha baby grand. After a few months, I invested in a better digital piano with weighted keys. Then a few years later, I invested in a Kawai upright that now sits in my office, and that I love more than is probably rational.

I wrote about those first lessons at the time, and then a year in. This is the update nobody asked for, but I’m writing anyway, because six years of something teaches you things that one year simply can’t.

What My Playing Actually Looks Like Now

Honestly? Inconsistent. And I think that’s worth saying plainly, because the way hobbies get talked about online — the daily practice routines, the steady progress charts, the relentless self-improvement narrative — doesn’t really match how most people actually live.

Some weeks I play every day. Some weeks I barely touch the piano. When life gets busy, when work piles up, when a new hobby is monopolising my evenings (watercolour painting, I’m looking at you), the piano gets pushed to the back burner. It pains me, but I just don’t have enough time in the day for everything I want to do!

But I always come back to it eventually. And I think that’s actually the more important metric than how often I play — the fact that it has never once occurred to me to get rid of it, or to decide I’m done with it. It’s just there, waiting, and I always go back.

I recently restarted lessons after a gap. Getting back into structured learning after a period of playing independently has reminded me how much a teacher accelerates things. There’s something about being accountable to another person — even just once a week — that changes how you approach practice.

Where I’m At, Level-Wise

I can play some grade 7 and 8 pieces. Technically, that puts me at quite a decent level. In practice, I tend to stick to intermediate repertoire most of the time, because that’s where playing is actually enjoyable rather than effortful. Plus, you can play some really nice pieces at my level! There’s more repertoire than I’m ever going to get through.

This is something I’ve made peace with: I’m not trying to pass exams. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I play because I love it, and I’m most likely to play consistently when I’m working on pieces I can actually get into rather than advanced works that take months of disciplined practice to get anywhere with (though I always have a few on the go, like my current Chopin Noctune I’m working on).

When I’m in a quiet period with piano — less time, other things going on — I go back to pieces I know well, easier things I can pick up quickly and actually play through properly. It keeps the relationship with the instrument alive without the pressure of feeling like I’m falling behind on something difficult.

My favourite composer is Schumann. His Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) is an album I love deeply — I can play several pieces from it. My favourite is Träumerei, Op. 15 No. 7. It’s one of those pieces that sounds simple and is anything but — the sensitivity it requires, the way you have to let the melody breathe — it’s taken me a long time to get anywhere near what I want it to sound like. I’m still working on it. I’ll probably always be working on it, and I don’t mind that at all.

What Having a Baby Did to My Playing

There was a long gap when my son was born. Not a complete stop — I’d play a little here and there — but the focused, regular practice disappeared almost entirely for a good while, for reasons that will be completely obvious to any parent.

Nobody warns you about how hobbies shrink in that period. Not because you don’t want them anymore, but because there genuinely isn’t the time or the mental space. Something has to give, and for me the piano was one of those things.

What I found was that it didn’t go away. The desire to play was still there, just waiting. I used to listen to people play piano on YouTube when I was naptrapped and breastfeeding. I would listen to Bach’s Goldberg Variations a lot, while listening to the score, as well as videos of people’s piano journeys.

And when I eventually came back to it properly — when my son was a bit older, and life had settled into some sort of rhythm — it felt like being reunited with something. A bit rusty. A bit tentative. But home.

I think this is worth saying for anyone reading this who is in that season of life and worried they’ll lose something they love. You don’t lose it. It waits.

What Six Years Has Actually Given Me

Everything, honestly.

Stress relief — genuinely one of the best. There is something about sitting at a piano that demands your full presence in a way very little else does. You cannot play well while you’re half-thinking about something else. The music requires all of you, and that forced presence is its own kind of rest.

A sense of discipline and commitment that I’m proud of. Not in a rigid, never-miss-a-day way (though it has been that way, but just not recently). But in the quieter sense that I’ve stuck with something for six years through a house move, a baby, several career pivots, and approximately four hundred other new hobbies.

Pure joy. I just love playing. That hasn’t changed at all since 2019. If anything, it’s grown, because the pieces I can play now are pieces I actually love, rather than exercises and scales.

And identity. Piano feels like part of who I am now, in a way it didn’t when I first sat down at the keyboard in 2019. The Kawai is in my office and it belongs there. I belong at it. It just feels right.

What I’d Tell Someone Thinking About Starting

Get a teacher, not an app. Apps are fine for dipping a toe in, but if you’re serious — if you want to actually play, not just dabble — a real teacher is worth every penny. The feedback, the accountability, the way a good teacher adjusts to exactly where you are and what you need: you can’t replicate that with software.

Get a proper instrument with weighted keys. The touch matters. Playing on unweighted keys builds the wrong muscle memory for piano, and you’ll have to unlearn it later.

Don’t let gaps make you feel like you’ve failed. The gap is normal. The gap is part of it. The question isn’t whether you’ll have a period where you barely play — you will — it’s whether you come back. If the answer is yes, you’re doing it right.

Don’t measure yourself against people who practice two hours a day. Most people don’t. Most people play when they can, love it when they do, and have a complicated relationship with guilt when they don’t. That’s just real life with a hobby, and it’s fine.

And finally: pick pieces you actually love. Life is too short to spend it playing music that doesn’t move you just because it’s the “right” level. You can get simple arrangements of many famous pieces, so don’t feel like you have to stick to the original version if it’s above your level.

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I wrote about getting started with piano back in 2019, and shared a one year update after my first year of lessons. You can also have a look at my piano if you’re curious about the instrument itself. And if you want to understand why I think this kind of adult creative pursuit matters so much, the pillar post for this series is probably the place to start.