When I was 8 years old, I started playing piano by myself, using old books of my sister (she plays piano too). When I was 9 years old, I got lessons at the musicschool. After a while I just took old books of my sister again and played that music, because the music I had to play was very easy, and I got bored... In July 2006 I went to the conservatory in Groningen (in the Netherlands) and played some music for Paul Komen. He immediately searched for a better teacher for me. After that summer I had private lessons from Siebert Nix. And now my teacher is Nata Tvereli, I'm having lessons at the conservatory. . I'm 15 years old now. So that's uhm... 7 years.

I started at the age of 8, but didn't really fall in love with piano until I was 13, when I went to high school. It was the 'sturm und drang' period of my life and Beethoven expressed so well what I was feeling. I used to practice/play the sonatas for hours, until about 2 am.
It's very unusual for a child to be enthused about piano until they get a sense of self-expression through the music and have accumulated some basic technique to express what they feel through the music.

Mozartiana

I started playing the keyboard when I was 9 years old. When I was 13 years old I played my first piano piece and immediately I fell in love with the piano. Now I'm 17 years old and I can play the Heroic Polonaise, I'm practicing Chopin's first Ballade and I can also play Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody 6 now. After only having 4 years of piano lessons I managed to play some rather difficult pieces, so imo, it's never too late to start playing the piano. By the way, one of the first pieces I ever practiced was Chopin's Nocturne 9-2. Took me 5 months to learn it, but once I could play it my technique had improved dramatically. My advice: play pieces that seem to be really hard. It can be frustrating, but it sure as hell isn't as boring as Czerny or Bach's inventions.

Czerny and Bach aren't boring!
By the way, I'm 16 years old now.

Well, I think I have everyone here beat. I started playing piano last year just before I turned 41.
I played bass guitar for many years but put it aside for various reasons. The main reason was that
the instrument is not harmonically complex enough for me. The love of music never goes away
and at least for me gets stronger and stronger so I bought a piano to fill the gap left by the bass.

Now after eight months now I can play about half of the Anna Magdalena notebook pretty well
and this last week I've started working on a couple of the little preludes. I have a lot of free time
on my hands so I get to practice quite a bit. Usually I play about an hour and a half in the morning
before work and sometimes as many as six hours at night but the norm is around 2 hours at night.
It's very cool how the better you get the more fun it becomes.

I have to say that I am a little depressed about not having taken this up much sooner
(my parents were never musically inclined, pushing me towards sports as a kid, never music or
the arts) but also there is a great sense of relief that at my age being a concert pianist is out of the
question which allows me firstly to focus on music that I love and secondly not to put tons of
competive pressure on myself. Now I can enjoy it when I hear people that play better than me
in a way I was never able to do when I heard better bass players. Except for those dang
five year old kids on youtube!

Regards,
Brian

Maybe you can record some of them and become a member. We don't have any on the site, yet.

Another one trying to wind me up
Bach's Inventions boring ???? They are among the very best study pieces there are, and musically so high above anything Czerny wrote that one should not even use the two names in one sentence. If anything is boring, it's Czerny's endless roulades of notes. Maybe not boring to the fingers, but just to the mind.

Having said this, I used to think the Inventions, and Bach in general, were boring for a long time... I dutifully trundled through them because it is was what my teacher told me to do, without much liking them or even seeing the point. Then at one stage, can't remember when exactly, Bach hit me like a ton of bricks. It will happen to you. There is no getting away from old JS

You advice is dead wrong though. Always playing pieces just outside your technical reach it tempting (used to do that a lot, too) and surely it is exciting. But I find, having wised up some, that playing the things you can play, and try do them really well, does just as much, if not more, for your technique and musicality.

Oh sheep! They did it to you again.



Here's a golden rule.

I try to do a mix of both - I'm always working on a few things I can play, and play really well, with not too much work, and then a few things that I won't be able to play for years.

Yeh, same here. Always learning new and hard stuff, but it is great to have some fallback repertoire you feel really comfortable with. So nice to relax and just play instead of always reaching up. That is how I can chuck out the odd CS in between ongoing projects