How should I start learning to play a piano?

First decide the *type* of music and style of playing you want to learn.

You can learn any type of music from classical to more casual playing, and you can learn to read musical notation or you can learn to "play by ear."

Classical music (most often taught by "piano teachers" though not all of them) will be fairly rigorous and teach you to read music and understand certain kinds of music theory and play certain types of pieces. It will take a fairly long time to get pretty good at, but if that's what you want, go for it and enjoy it.

The more casual types of music can be learned and played much more quickly, and often have certain chords or patterns that are present in most of the tunes.

Those kinds of music can also often be played "by ear," meaning that you wouldn't be reading musical notations but would be learning things by sound instead.

I studied classical piano as a child (to early-mid teens) and imo unless that's what you really want, knowing what I know now, I would much have preferred to have learned to play by ear and more casual types of music. Unless classical piano is kept up, it's hard to play even reasonably well and you're stuck with a smaller repertoire than otherwise. Of course, I can still read the sheet music of any type of music but having learned to play by ear would give me a skill that could continue more easily forever, and a much wider repertoire.

You *can* learn any kind of piano online at YouTube, but teachers will vary widely in their ability to be good teachers, and it will take longer than having any teacher sitting beside you giving you their total attention, and will also depend much more on your discipline since there will be no classes to force you to do things and practice in a certain time frame.

Learning to play piano on "keyboards" rather than actual pianos is quite rewarding and common these days, and any kind of music can be played on them (classical not so much though). There's loads of info on learning keyboards on YouTube too.

I'd suggest going to YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/

Then entering into the search box at top of the page the type of music you want to learn (get specific like country, pop, blues, classical, etc), or just search for something like learning to read music for piano, or learning to play piano by ear. Add the word *keyboard* if you don't want to be limited to actual pianos.

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