Q&A with Jacob’s Piano

Many of you want to know for how long I’ve played piano. I started when I was around six or seven years old and today, I’m 31 years old. that makes it 24 years that I’ve actually played piano. We had a piano where I grew up, and I started to play that in a very young age. When I was around seven or eight years old my mother signed me up for piano lessons but actually I only got lessons for about three or four years and then I stopped the lessons continuing learning on my own. But I have played on and off my entire life.

My current keyboard is a Roland RD-800. That’s the one I’ve used for almost all my videos for the last couple of years. I really love the Roland keyboards. They have a very natural feel to it, it feels like a real piano to play actually. Obviously, there’s also the acoustic piano but that’s a new one. At this time (November 2022) I have not created any YouTube videos with this piano here but it is a Yamaha model U3 and I promise that you will see a lot more to this piano.

Edit: I have now recorded videos on the acoustic piano which is available on YouTube.

Well, the short answer is no I don’t play concerts but it’s a big dream for me to play some concerts. If you follow me on Instagram you probably know that recently I played a live-stream event for YouTube. There was supposed to be some audience. That would have been my first concert for some audience but it didn’t work out well with the audience. So still, I haven’t played a real concert for any audience yet. It’s a dream for me to do in the future but who knows when it will happen. I don’t know, probably some years from now.

This is a quite difficult question to answer because I don’t really get inspiration from very specific things. I usually just sit down at the piano and then improvise, looking for new melodies and then suddenly there’s some melody that’s just working great and then I start to develop that into a whole composition. Of course, sometimes I’m listening a lot to other composers and try to get some inspiration from their compositions but usually, I just get inspired by whatever I’m improvising on the keyboard.

For how long I practice a day really depends on the period I’m in. If I’m practicing a song for a video recording, then I usually practice for a few hours, maybe two hours per day. I rarely practice more than that because it simply doesn’t work for me to sit down at the piano and just practice hour after hour. I simply lose my concentration by doing that. If I’m in a period where I’m not really working on a specific music track, then actually I don’t practice so much. I have many days where I don’t practice at all in those periods.

I definitely think it’s possible to learn piano without a piano teacher. As I said in the beginning of this Q&A, most of what I’m capable of is actually self-taught. I only had a teacher for a few years when I was young. Obviously having a teacher can make a huge difference, but you’re definitely also able to learn piano on your own. Many of my friends have learned piano on their own and actually they play at a very decent level, I think.

My best advice to improve your hand coordination is first to learn everything in your right hand, then learn everything in the left hand and then when you combine the hands, play extremely slowly. I mean really, really slowly. Just one note at a time. It’s just muscle memory. Suddenly you start to be able to play things together and then you can slowly increase the pace you’re playing at and then suddenly you’re able to play at the original pace that you’re aiming for.