How Adults are Different from Young Beginners

If you’re an adult beginning keyboard student, it's important to choose a teacher who is prepared to work specifically with adult beginning students. This is because adult piano students learn differently than young piano students.

For one thing, a seven-year-old beginner generally has better coordination than an adult beginner. When asked to imitate a phrase of music, the young student readily plays it back. An adult beginner, on the other hand, would probably want to hear the phrase again! Or perhaps want to hear only the first two or three notes of it, again. Slowly!

But adult beginners have an advantage, in that they have much better developed thinking skills than a seven-year-old. We adults can think of more than one thing at the same time. This is a tremendous asset in learning how to play piano or keyboard and how to read music.