“I’m lost in the YouTube tutorials on how to practice. If I go to a video on how to practice chords, five minutes in they’ll switch to something else.” That message could’ve been describing my early twenties almost word for word. I had forty browser tabs of piano tutorials open at any given time and could not have told you, with a straight face, what I actually knew how to do on my own.
Tutorial videos feel like progress. You watch, you nod along, your hands move when the video tells them to, and you finish feeling like you learned something. But close the laptop and try the same thing without the video playing, and it’s gone. That’s not a memory problem. That’s a sign you were never actually practicing — you were spectating with your hands on the keys.
Why Tutorials Keep You Stuck Instead of Moving You Forward
A tutorial’s whole job is to get you through one video, start to finish, feeling accomplished. It’s not built to teach you a transferable skill — it’s built to be watchable. That means most of them jump around, layer in extra flourishes to look impressive, and never slow down long enough to let you actually absorb the underlying idea. You finish twenty tutorials and still can’t sit down and figure out a new song on your own, because you were never asked to.
What to Do Instead of Watching Another Tutorial
- Pick one short section of one song — four bars, tops. Not a whole tutorial’s worth. One small chunk.
- Watch it once, then close the video completely. Try to play it from memory. This is the step almost nobody does, and it’s the entire point — this is where the actual learning happens.
- When you get stuck, use your ear before you use the video. Hum the part, find the note, feel for the chord shape. Only go back to the video as a last resort, not a first instinct.
Why This Works
The struggle you feel when you close the video and try it yourself is the practice. That’s the rep that actually builds skill — not the watching part. Tutorials aren’t useless, but they’re a reference, not a replacement for the work of figuring it out with your own ears and hands. The moment you start treating them that way, your progress stops being tied to how many videos you can find and starts being tied to how much you’ve actually built yourself.
You don’t need more tutorials. You need fewer tutorials and more moments of closing the laptop and just trying.
If you want a structured path that’s built around training your ear instead of stacking more videos, I put together a free first lesson that does exactly that — start here.
