I Tried to Become a Musician Using Apps and a Light-Up Piano

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.

Alex Zhang is shredding on the piano. He sits at a shiny black Steinway grand and rocks back and forth as his fingers fly across the keys, a flurry of blurred digits that leap from one end of the keyboard to the other. The piece he’s playing, “Paganini Jazz” by Turkish composer Fazil Say, is a sonic stir-fry of rapid crescendos, octave changes, and snappy jazz stylings. From my perspective, someone with no musical training whatsoever, it looks and sounds like magic.

Zhang is a spiky-haired 15-year-old (“I’m turning 16 this October!”) dressed in a black shirt and blazer. His performance is the culmination of the youth honors recital finals at the annual convention of the Music Teachers’ Association of California, held at the Santa Clara Hyatt this past June.

He closes the piece with a rousing flourish and, as the audience applauds, he stands and bows. After watching the virtuosic performances of Zhang and his fellow young musicians, I can’t help but lean back and think, “I bet I could do that.”

Rock and Roll Fantasy

How we learn to play music has stayed pretty much the same for most of human history: You get an instrument, pay someone to teach you to play it, and practice endlessly. It’s a tried-and-true combination of memorization, muscle memory, and applied theory. It takes serious time and commitment to get good, which is what makes the prospect so daunting.

But the promise of the digital revolution was that we would be able to do everything faster, better, easier. If I can watch any movie anywhere I go or have the world’s dumbest pillow delivered to my house in mere hours, then I should be able to fast-track my creative whims as well. Thankfully, technology is here to help.

Digital technology has made music production relatively affordable and accessible. Programs like GarageBand on Mac and iOS platforms replicate a traditional recording studio. Apps like Yousician and devices like the ONE Smart Piano Light aim to facilitate foundational music learning through gamified lessons. But how much more effective are these techniques than face-to-face lessons from a human teacher?

Andrew Cooperstock, one half of the piano/violin duo Opus Two, has been a professional piano teacher for over 30 years. He embraces technology enough to use an iPad to read sheet music while he plays, but his educational approach is still mostly conventional.

“I don’t think you can really learn to play a musical instrument just by using an app or watching a video or reading a book about it,” Cooperstock says. “I think you need a teacher who can guide you.”

Now, I am no musician. I don’t know how to read music, distinguish between major and minor scales, or pronounce “arpeggio.” I don’t clap along during concerts because I always wind up being out of sync. Creating or even learning how to play music never seemed viable for me. But it’s always something I thought would be cool. Which is why I’ve decided to offer myself up as a musically challenged guinea pig.

My goal is simple: to become as proficient at playing music as I can, as quickly as I can, without the help of a teacher, and with the help of technology. I allot myself a month. By the end, I will have to produce some tangible results. It’s a crash course on the democratization of music.

In the lobby of the Hyatt, I catch up with Zhang, the teenage maestro, after his MTAC recital. He tells me he’s been playing piano since he was 5, works regularly with a professional teacher, and practices at least two hours a day. I tell him about my plan to learn to play music via apps and flashing keyboards. He seems skeptical.

“So you’ve never played any kind of music before?” he asks.

“Nope,” I say. Technically, this is a lie. I did take violin lessons in fifth grade, but I don’t count that as real musical training because (A) I was not good, and (B) I have not played since.

“Well, I think first you have to learn how to read the piece, like the notes,” Zhang says. “And then you have to know how to move your fingers. I think that would probably take a month for you, maybe.”

“Just to learn how to move my fingers and read the music?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I think with technology, it might be a bit faster for you.”

“How long do you think it would take me to get as good as you are?”

He laughs. “Uh, a long time. It took me 10 years to get here, right? It will probably take you 10 years.” Then he shrugs. “Or less, that’s all I can say.”

It’s not a resounding vote of confidence, but I’ll take what I can get.

Before I can come anywhere close to playing music, I feel that I need to understand the fundamentals. So I go to the place anyone goes to learn anything these days: YouTube.

Don’t Stop Believin’

“YouTube doesn’t completely remove the need to have a teacher,” says Rick Beato, a music YouTuber who runs a channel with just over a million subscribers. “But you can sure learn a lot by going on there, whether it’s learning how to play a song or change your water heater.”

Beato isn’t somebody you’d peg as a typical YouTuber. He’s a 57-year-old, white-haired producer from Atlanta who started his Everything Music channel because an intern suggested he should. Though Beato was skeptical, his wealth of musical knowledge and infectious enthusiasm struck a chord (I know, I know) with his audience. His most popular videos are a series called “What Makes This Song Great?” In each, Beato picks a song by artists from Journey to Tom Petty to Tool and analyzes every element of the sound. He likens the approach to a forensic analysis.

“I want people to learn about how songs are put together, right down to the production of it, right down to the individual sounds,” Beato says. “How do you produce your own tracks, how do you write your own songs, and take these ideas and put them through your own personal lens and experience and write your own music?”

Beato’s breakdowns help provide a foundation for where I want to go. I know I want to make a great song, and now I know what makes a great song, though that doesn’t mean much unless I can actually play one. I need to learn an instrument.

Piano Man

I choose the piano because it’s a relatively straightforward instrument (I’m not about to go throw myself on a zither).

I split the task of my formative musical development between two products: the smartphone app Yousician and the ONE Light Keyboard, which is advertised as “a piano that can teach you to play.” Both of these digital tutors follow the same basic approach: bite-size exercises in which you play along with color-coded notes as they scroll across the screen, Guitar Hero–style. Yousician relies on your phone’s mic to pick up tonality and determine if you’re playing the right notes. You’ll need an instrument to produce the sounds in the first place, though. The ONE has the edge there, since it is an actual keyboard. The individual keys light up with a dull red glow as they follow the lessons displayed on a companion app. Both options feature tutorial videos and licensed third-party pop music tracks to play along to. In general, the goal is to create an engaging educational experience, all without that pesky human interference.

“You will learn faster,” says Chris Thür, CEO of Yousician. “Not because there was a trick or a secret, but because you enjoyed it so much, you made the time.”

As I alternate between lessons from the two services, I can feel myself improving. My sense of rhythm has gotten better (at least during the exercises). I start to recognize individual notes. And I can follow the heck out of flashing lights.

What I’m not prepared for is the physical toll. My hands ache. I never imagined my pinkies would see so much use. I’ve developed a kind of carpal-something syndrome that shoots such sharp pain through my wrists it has woken me up at night. The multitasking is a challenge as well. Of course I knew I’d be using both hands to play the piano, but I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to make my fingers hit different notes at the same time. It’s like trying to rub your stomach and pat your head simultaneously, only with the added pressure of striving for rhythmic accuracy. Turns out, playing music is hard.

I call up Zhang and put him on speakerphone. He agrees to listen to the progress I’ve made and give me his honest feedback.

“I don’t know if you’ll have heard this piece before,” I say. “It’s kind of obscure.”

I play “Für Elise” by Beethoven. Or at least the first 20 seconds of it.

“So, this piece, ‘Für Elise,’ yeah, OK,” Zhang says. “I think it’s medium level or easier, like probably an 8-year-old or a 10-year-old, they could play it.”

Oof.

“Obviously, I could hear some wrong notes and it was kind of slow,” Zhang says. He asks how long I’ve been practicing, and I tell him less than a month. He throws me a bone: “That was good for the amount of time you’ve been playing.”

The theoretical 8-year-olds, he clarifies, would have been practicing for at least a year or two before they dove into Beethoven. It’s not the age that matters, but the dedication. No matter how good the technology, it seems there’s no substitute for sheer time.

But I am nothing if not impatient. After all, competency on a musical instrument is just a means to an end. The finished product, the song, is what counts. I want to be able to make something. It shouldn’t matter how I get there.

Beat It

“Music education was obsolete for me from day one,” says Scott Hansen, who makes music as Tycho. “I just don’t do well with education in a structured sense.”

Hansen began his music career in the late ‘90s, when he was 21. He got a Roland MC 303 Groovebox and just started tinkering. He soon found that he had an aptitude for creating interesting sounds. From there he moved onto other synthesizers, guitars, and software plugins. All without any formal training.

“I have zero music theory,” Hansen says. “It’s literally like sit down, start playing shit till it sounds good, then play another instrument till that sounds good.”

If some guy like Hansen could successfully cut his own musical path, then surely I, some other guy, should be able to do it as well. Maybe I don’t need to learn an instrument at all. Maybe what I need is the right technology.

The Roli Seaboard Block and the Sensel Morph are midi controllers, devices that plug into a computer to trigger electronic sounds. Both have polyphonic pressure technology, meaning that they respond to pressure and movement changes on their surfaces. The intent is to give the player even more control over their musical expression. My reason for using them is that it seems easier to control music just by feeling it.

“There’s so many things available now, you don’t really need much musical expertise,” says Lee Malcolm, who plays synth and drums in the English post-rock-turned-live-electronica band Vessels. “You can just smash your big flappy meat hands onto your keyboard and play the right sort of notes.”

I take his advice. For two weeks, I spend every free moment I’m not sleeping or pooping hunched over, stabbing at the controllers’ squishy silicone pads. It feels much different than playing the piano. For starters, there’s no pressure to play for more than a couple seconds at a time. I can just poke a pad, see how it sounds, then keep poking other pads until I find a combination I like. I record the sounds and chain them together in a program called Bitwig Studio, a digital audio workstation similar to Ableton or Apple’s Pro Tools. There, I layer on other effects—arpeggiated drum patterns, mushy synths, stray background stings—until it begins to take on the aura of real music.

This all feels like an act of sheer hubris, like I’ve stolen fire from the gods without learning how to control it. None of the sounds I produce are my own creation; I’ve just aligned and layered them in such a way that it feels like I’ve made something tangible. With the production software, I can take the same note patterns I’ve already arranged and modify them to sound a thousand different ways. It’s overwhelming.

Dave Linnenbank, senior specification manager at Bitwig, says that this customizability is part of what makes software production so appealing to aspiring music makers. But he cautions that an abundance of options does not a good artist make.

“It’s kind of like saying, oh, we have all the best ingredients in the world, now make steak tartare,” Linnenbank says. “It’s still difficult to do.”

In time, what emerges is a three-minute instrumental built on loops and sound packs and a shotgunned self-education in music. Rather than embarrass myself further by attempting to sing, I employ vocal performances by my unsuspecting colleagues from WIRED’s weekly Gadget Lab podcast. (Sorry in advance, guys.)

And so, without further ado, please check out my SoundCloud:

Truth Hurts

I’m sitting in the lower level of Hansen’s San Francisco home/studio, surrounded by acoustic padding, effects pedals, and analog synth boards. This is where he produces his beautifully ethereal signature sound that people love. But the audio blasting through his pro-spec Genelec studio monitors is that of my decidedly unethereal single. Hansen fiddles with volume and frequency knobs the whole time it plays, trying to get the sound right. Then it’s over. Hansen hands back the flash drive and offers some earnest constructive criticism. It’s good advice, but I can tell he’s holding back. I ask him for his honest opinion.

He says it quick, like he’s pulling off a Band-Aid: “If I’m being ruthless, that definitely sounds like, kind of like, yeah, you don’t know how to make music.”

“It’s not much of a song,” says Rick Beato, after I coax him into listening as well. “Musically, it’s not that interesting. Now, you kind of have the right instrumentation. You have a bass drum, you have bass, you have kind of a chord progression, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has the proper elements of a song.”

In other words: It’s no steak tartare.

I won’t be selling out stadiums anytime soon. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea to just decide that I could make something in a medium I hadn’t earned access to. With the technology at our disposal, it’s easier to make something than it is to know it. The producing, the software editing, that was more approachable than learning how to play the piano. The final product might have been “not much of a song,” but at least I had created something. The problem is, I didn’t put in the time or effort to collect some musical building blocks, so all I can do is discover stuff by randomly prodding some controller.

“A lot of the greatest artists of all time didn’t have a formal music education,” says Tom Evans, Malcolm’s Vessels bandmate. “What’s still necessary is people putting time into it to get good at expressing themselves.”

It wasn’t all futile. The only reason I even attempted to learn to make something in the first place is because technology lowered the barrier to entry. The standard order of operations had flipped. When you have technology that lets you access the act of creation, the knowledge that you have the ability to actually make something can inspire the desire to learn how to do it properly. This process left me with a desire to slow down, forget about the end product, and devote time to learning.

“You can easily learn anything you want,” Hansen says. “As long as you have the passion and it’s something that you’re so interested in that you’re just gonna keep going and just gonna try everything. It’s just trial and error—brute force attack it.”

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