How to Learn Piano on Your Own, Free and in Order

Sets up the bench before you touch a key: centered on the keyboard, feet flat, elbows nearly level with the keys. The egg-in-your-palm image for hand shape is the part to remember.

Starts with a checklist of hand faults, from flat and buckled fingers to sunken or peaked wrists, then fixes them with kneecap and tabletop-bridge drills. Read it after the Yamaha page, since it zooms in on the fingers.

Covers the musical alphabet and the lines and spaces of both clefs, with mnemonics like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and All Cows Eat Grass. Use it as a note-name primer before the courses; the site also sells courses.

Forty-one free YouTube lessons from a university teacher, including chords (C, G7, F, D7), pedal, and both hands. They follow Alfred's Adult All-in-One Level 1 lesson by lesson, a commercial book to buy or borrow, and the free starter PDF asks for your email.

Unit 1's sixteen videos pair note reading with eight easy songs and four finger exercises, worked in overlapping sets of four lessons. Choose it over the Alfred-based course if you want built-in review; the page describes only Unit 1, so check what follows.

Free lessons since 1994, each about 35 minutes, starting at Lesson 1 in the Starter Studies menu, taught by film composer and jazz musician Clinton S. Clark. Works as a second voice when a course lesson isn't landing; support is by buying his music.

Gives each major key a printable sheet of scales, I, IV and V chords, inversions, and arpeggios, plus the rule for building a major chord: count up four half-steps, then three. Part 2 is finished only for C, F, G and Bb.

Download Book I, a 15-page scan of J.S. Bach minuets and dances for keyboard, as first repertoire once you can read both clefs. It is a plain scan with no instruction, and IMSLP also sells a membership, though the download is free.

Separates playing from practicing: practice means a specific goal and deliberate work, not replaying pieces for hours. Fifteen tips from a teacher who calls instant feedback the biggest benefit of lessons, so use them as a self-check.

The free online book opens by calling the standard routine of scales, slow reading, and memorizing "wrong" and says it will "almost guarantee" students "will not progress beyond intermediate level". Contrarian by design, so treat it as a second opinion once you have a routine.

Names habits self-taught players pick up, led by illogical fingering (the same fingers for every chord) and skipped theory. Each links to a video fix, but the page doesn't say whether those are free, so rely on the list.