Music is sound organised in time and when you have plenty of time on your hands, you have the opportunity to make plenty of sound.
The best way to learn is with a personal teacher, however if that is not affordable for you, or practicable, you can learn on-line.
There’s a multitude of YouTube video tutorials by musicians eager to pass on their skills, though a lot of these require that you have already developed some basic skills.
For complete beginners, there are apps that can help you make a start with the instrument of choice. This can provide you with good preparation for formal lessons down the track. For example, Anne has already learned piano and has recently started learning to play the guitar. She has previously tried lessons with a teacher but it didn’t seem to click. Her friend Athina taught her the chords to “Silent Night” (not quite and Easter song but fun to play) and introduced her to an app called Simply Guitar. Overnight, Anne progressed to where she could strum away happily.
‘You can use it on your phone or ipad. I prefer ipad,’ Anne says. There is also an app called Simply Piano.
Anne demonstrated for Panorama and we noticed that it works using pictures rather than musical notation, so that previous knowledge of theory is not needed. The program will show you a note to play, then analyse what you play back and lets you know whether you played the right note.
‘’You get a seven day free trial” says Anne, “After that, you need to pay a yearly subscription of $139.99”. When you choose an app, it is important to try it out first to make sure that it is does the trick for you. We all learn differently and there are many apps to choose from.
To give a comparison of costs, on average, a personal music teacher will charge upwards from $40 per half hour for a weekly, individual lesson. We found that going on-line to investigate all the different ways of learning music can be entertainment in itself, so why not explore today?
By Warren Heggarty from Panorama magazine
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