Learning Piano
I bought a piano a while ago, and I was so thrilled to play around with it. However, when it came down to actually learning how to play it, I was definitely not motivated. This article is meant to help others in my situation to motivate themselves to learn how to play piano. It will give you what you need when you need it rather than making you do your own research or telling you to jump-the-gun and start with something too difficult.
Step 1: Learn the notes on the keyboard.
There is not a single resource that helped me more than others. However, I wrote the letters on the keyboard, right above the keys to remind me when I forgot which keys were which notes. I just wrote where 'A' was and I could manage to figure out the rest, but do not feel ashamed if you feel the need to write the other note letters as well.
Step 2: Learn basic chords and practice them.
Your first step in learning to play your piano should be to practice chords. You don't have to understand how they work, but practice playing them. One of the most useful resources I found for practicing chords was the Virtual Piano Chords tool from PianoWorld.
I found it intuitive enough and I was a total noob at music.
I barely even knew what the notes on the keyboard were, let alone what the chords were called.
That said, after practicing chords for a while, I managed to memorize a few patterns, mainly major and minor chords, which makes it easier to come up with your own tunes.
Step 3: Practice a few simple songs.
For this step, I figure I should just recommend a few songs I found easy to learn and enjoyed playing. I found it incredibly boring to learn how to play something like Mary Had A Little Lamb, and I started looking up slow songs to start with which actually interested me.
One such song was Eyes On Me, which I find to be a very beautiful song. The best resource I found for learning that song in a simple way was TabNabber. Granted, some of the TabNabber notes may not be accurate to the source material, but I found the simplification helpful in the learning process.
I found it easiest to just look at sheet music from a rotated perspective.
Just rotate the page 90 degrees and the notes line up with the keyboard. Who knew!
I also found that Guild Wars 2 instruments were fairly realistic and could be useful in memorizing some song notes. That said, the notes are numbers 1-8 and have to be converted to A-G, which means you're missing about half the possible notes.
Oh well.