I'd suggest people really focus on their ear training though over visual feedback. Just play your scales through the circle of fifths -- set a metronome at 60, go for both hands, two octaves, parallel and contrary motion. Start with major and then move on to the three types of minor. The thing you're developing is internalizing the sound of the scales. Just picking out an F harmonic minor scale and getting a visualization I think is less fruitful for the long term.
Also, for triads, while it is super important to know what the quality of the chords are inside a scale (so that you can pick up your forms like a ii-V-I in any key), I think it's more important to practice the chords themselves. When I was taught, my teacher just had me pick a few keys every morning, and then practice the major, minor, diminished, and augmented triads, with their inversions. Within a week you'll have practiced all of them. Once he could call out any key and I could play them up and down with the metronome at a decent clip, we moved onto the 10 four part chords and did the same. And then did it again in open position. And then... there's always more!
For learning how the triads sit inside a key, I'd suggest playing the triad in the left hand and then playing up and down the scale so that you can start hearing the chord with the mode. So, Cmaj triad, play the C scale up/down, Dmin triad, play D dorian up/down, etc. At least that's how I was taught.
But, as my current teacher likes to point out, there's no "true" way. He's a bassist, and has mentioned to me a few times some old survey asking pro players to write out their fingerings for some famous passages -- the results were all over the place, as everyone brings their own approach.
[1] https://archive.org/details/BACHCarlPhilippeEmanuel.EssayOnT...
Each diatonic (major, minor or modal) scale consists of 7 distinct notes, and the fingering is always 1-2-3 1-2-3-4 in one direction, and the reverse in the other direction, however, you need to find where this sequence starts within the scale. The more black keys there are in a scale, the fewer the possible comfortable positions. Always put your thumb on a white key, and prefer putting your 3rd and especially your 4th fingers on black keys, if possible. (Fun fact: for the major scales, once you have your right hand's fingering, you can imagine mirroring the keyboard and your hand around the D or G# key and you get another major scale with a good fingering for the left hand).
DO NOT start with C major if it's your first time learning scales. Maybe start with E major (4 sharps) as it is comfortable and you can use the mirrored fingering in the other hand.
Knowing the fingerings is a good start, but you need to learn to do these exercises without tension and with proper posture and hand movements. This is something where it's best to have in-person instruction from an expert who can show you the technique and correct your mistakes. But if you can't do that, maybe the next best thing would be to watch some YouTube videos and record yourself playing.
Another open source app that I’ve been using to practice is https://github.com/sightread/sightread
If I install the hosted .deb and run it though, then press a, s, d with a 5 second wait it's fine. If I push them after half a second, so while the previous note is playing, it goes very wrong. Is that supposed to happen?
a (C plays, wait 1 second, C still plays), s (after C finishes D plays, a long time later).
press a,s,d and it's C for about 3 seconds, then D and E together.
Is this just a bug with my desktop environment?
I meant: At 3:17, which is the perfect fifth of E. It is B, the video is showing A.
The notes are all rendered according to conventional music notation standards as per Elaine Gould's book "Behind Bars". Writing this code was not straightforward, but worth the effort as it's very flexible.
Progress is tracked intelligently, i.e. accuracy and response times are recorded per note, and exercises can be directed towards improving weak spots. This was all borne out of a frustration I had with how long it takes, and how much material is needed to make progress with sight reading skills.
I'm hoping to release it soon (next few months - it's mostly finished), but slightly concerned it's too niche. I guess it will mostly appeal to serious but beginner/intermediate pianists who want to put in the hard yards to develop sight reading abilities to an advanced level.
Scales and Arpeggios also bed the keys into your muscle memory which I've found it has made learning harmony a lot quicker as I can take a progression and experiment with it in the various keys and also experiment with different voice leadings by messing with the inversions.
But if the pressing concern is staying motivated and/or enjoying the instrument through playing then I agree that an excessive focus on fundamentals is going to be a slog
The other problem is that their learning technique, in which you start with fewer notes and add in all the notes over time, is not good at ALL. It masks certain things from you and even makes some things harder at lower difficulties when it's playing some scale and you don't know that so you're just playing random notes in it. Knowing that it was just a pentatonic scale or something would make it much simpler. Instead, you're taught to just play isolated notes instead of learning how to understand what that scale was, how to play it, and how to apply that to other songs. It's almost outright hostile towards a big picture music theory based approach on teaching how to play and instead focuses on memorizing the specific notes for each section of each song.
Anyway, piano scales and chords are not challenging to learn compared to most piano technique. If you don't have a teacher then buy Hanon, get a decent music theory book, and look up Youtube videos. Any of these training wheels based learning approaches seem to just assume that once you do it enough you'll pick up the theory. No. If you can't afford lessons (which I stress are very important) then you should at least make use of simple music theory books and videos on Youtube.
I have tried Playground Sessions and recommend it.
It has different kinds of notes presentation modes.
Proper technique is also important so that playing is actually fun and not painful. Even just a few lessons on how to properly sit, how to avoid tension in your hands and so on can go a long way. There are video lessons that explain that stuff as well but you need to be very disciplined and really repeat these lessons over and over.
You can absolutely self-learn the piano. People that genuinely don't have the money for a teacher shouldn't let that stop them but it absolutely is harder. Set yourself up for success if you can.
I take weekly music lessons and have been doing that for a decade. After every lesson -- since the very first one -- I am amazed by how many simple things that I get wrong, and how many different areas where I could improve. The teacher just sees/hears that immediately, when you have no idea what you did wrong. And the music just sounds different.
Not only that, the teacher discusses the piece with you, tells you the efficient way to practice (a specific piece or specific passage) etc.
You would probably sound ok to a random stranger, but you quickly hit a bottleneck. You spend a lot of time doing incorrect/inefficient things without knowing it.
$100/hr is expensive, but well worth it.
Scales have specific fingerings and hand movements, including thumb over/under movements at specific locations.
They're not optional extras. They're essential for fluid playing.
More subtly there's also basic finger/hand positioning, which has to be a difficult combination of as-relaxed-as-possible but also firm and precise, so you get fine control over dynamics and timing.
If you don't learn the vocabulary of physical movements, you won't have the physical foundation you need to play notated music properly beyond the very basics.
At the moment, I’m focussing on working on my timing by playing rhythm instead of lead guitar.
If you haven't already, please PLEASE choose the "invert" option for the string order. Your low pitched E string (the red one) should be on the bottom of the strings. It will mean that all your work will transfer immediately to both guitar tabs as well as conventional chord charts. The fact that Rocksmith is teaching people to train their muscle memory on upside down chord charts is so insane to me.
Elton John studied at the Royal Academy of Music. Alicia Keys is classically trained. Lady Gaga had lessons from the age of 4.
Even someone like Vangelis - nominally self-taught, and not a reader or writer - had lessons when he was starting out.