So, it’s been a year since I started learning piano.

And since then, almost every day I’ve been practicing and studying at least one hour for each session. And I’m really proud of this.

As I already planned, I focused mainly on exercises about scales, arpeggios and simple chord progressions, starting from classical music and studying jazz harmony at the same time.

So, today I’m able to play almost all major and minor scales and to play simple chord progressions, such as some jazz-standard drop-2 exercises. I can play all first twenty Hanon’s exercises in a decent clear way and at a fair speed - some of them until 200 bpm.

I also learnt to play Bach’s Prelude in C, which is a mandatory piece for beginners and I’m currently learning to play another couple of well-known classical short pieces.

As a side effect, I’ve been listening a lot of music, especially jazz and classical (London Symphony Orchestra über alles), but now with a different mood.

About the large amount of resources available nowadays online, I dealt with it filtering out by quality. Meantime, I’ve been setting small intermediate goals to reach. Small steps are really important to proceed in our personal roadmap, and in this way I figured out that many tutorials were not so valuable as they seemed at a first glance.

While studying more simple classical compositions, from now on I want to improve in the following topics:

  • Sight reading: I just started to recognize some patterns and this skill is super-useful for learning at a greater speed.
  • Ear training. I have I quite good relative pitch already.
  • Musical modes, putting them in the context of jazz chord progressions.

Other important topics to consider:

  • Learning to pedal for sustain.
  • Upgrade to a proper weighted full keyboard.

For this second year as a piano player I hope to reach a proper intermediate level, able to play all modes and some 10-20 classical compositions. I’ll keep you posted.