Apps can help you learn an instrument, but they're not enough

You can get help from iPhone and iPad apps to learn piano. What you should not do is cancel your practice sessions with a live teacher.

My piano playing has been compared to Rachmaninoff's. Only last week, someone said, "he's not as good as Rachmaninoff."

I can't say I'm surprised, but I want you to know that I am trying. So for instance, right now, I am 525 days into Duolingo Piano and 48 days into using Simply Piano.

Plus I'm something like eight half-hour lessons in to a course with a real-life piano teacher.

I know this is AppleInsider, I know I tend to turn to technology first, plus at least I know I should build up suspense. But forget that. If you can get actual piano lessons from a teacher, that is what you should do.

It is vastly better than trying to do it from an app. Plus apps can be so maddening.

However, they do also have their place and their uses, and if it's only a peculiar stubbornness that keeps me on Duolingo Piano, I am much more taken with Simply Piano.

Simply Piano

Simply Piano is a subscription service and for some reason, prices are hard to determine. The short version is that you can probably get it for about $150 a year by following this link.

It is ridiculous that I have to say "probably." The issue is that the App Store lists multiple plans but the app itself then charges completely different sums.

The difference is dramatic, too. In my case, an individual plan in the UK is listed as 105 pounds but is actually 165 pounds. Simply Piano support claims that this is a currency conversion thing, but it quite plainly is not — I'm in the UK, on the UK App Store, looking at UK prices and paying in UK currency.

Or in fact over-paying in UK currency. Following that link above, I can save 10 pounds ($13.42) per month.

It's probably just that the developer does not update its App Store listings, which is bad enough. But it does also sour the whole app and make you feel like it's all a scam.

But putting that aside, Simply Piano is a good app for iPhone and iPad. I wish there were a Mac version, but there isn't.

I also wish the official website were better. If you want to check any detail, you have to go through a long and oddly repetitive questionnaire before directing you to the App Store.

As I keep saying, though, as if to convince myself, the app is genuinely good. Plus I do believe that you can directly connect your piano to your iPhone or iPad while using the app, although you don't have to.

The first time you sign up for Simply Piano, it shows you a keyboard and asks you to press certain specific keys. From that, it learns what your piano sounds like and forever afterwards, it just listens as you play. It's even good at that when, for the sake of my neighbors, I turn the piano's volume down low.

The unique selling point of Simply Piano is that what you play are pop songs, chiefly, and it guides you through them. It's simpler than that sounds because although you hear the original song as a backing track, you're only playing a very few of the notes.

Simply Piano uses the finger-numbering technique where your fingers are numbered 1 to 5 from your thumb to your pinky. Notes are often shown on screen with this number above them, though not always, and the app is clearly aiming to wean you off relying on that.

Whether it's that or warm-up exercises, what you see on screen is a music stave with notes on and a cursor steadily scrolling along the line. When the cursor hits a note, you're supposed to play it, and if you get that right, the note turns blue.

Get it wrong, either by playing the wrong thing or being late, the note turns red. Get enough red notes and the music stops, rewinds, and starts again.

If you still get it wrong, it rewinds to the start and plays the track more slowly.

There are all sorts of extras to do with identifying notes, which are useful when you're away and can't actually play your keyboard. And while I may not actually recognize all of the music tracks included in the app, I do see that keeps adding more.

It's not shy about telling you that, too. There's also a bit of a hard sell as it tries to get you to sign up family members, as if I'm going to admit them that I'm doing this and doing it so badly.

I'd like fewer promotions, but I've seen worse. What I'd really like is for the makers to figure out a way that I don't have to take my hands off the keys to reach over and tap buttons on my iPad. But yesterday I realized I could use Universal Control and place my Mac's trackpad nearer to the piano, so that's something.

Duolingo Piano

Just skip this app. I'll tell you what's so bad about it, but less because that might be useful in helping you decide, more because I want to scream it off my chest.

Duolingo has taught me nothing in 500-odd days, but to be fair, it has always been quick. I can't remember the last time a lesson took even a full minute, so when you're in a hurry, that is appealing.

Plus it has reinforced things for me. That will start with how it suddenly introduces new topics, like asking me to swipe across the screen to mark a measure.

Cue much popping off to Google and YouTube to find out what a measure even is. But then I'd come back and I'd get it right, so I'd have that dopamine hit and so remain hooked.

My piano teacher says she doesn't use any apps because why would she? She can already play, and she really can, you should hear her. But from what she's seen of them, the believes that they can be solely about this fast dopamine hit, sometimes solely about making learning become a game.

She's right, and I've come to the conclusion that it is not enough to simply complain about Duolingo and not just enough to shout a bit. There are moments when Duolingo Piano has made me learn what a high F really sounds like.

One example. Periodically, Duolingo will require you to go through screens about opening a chest. It's presented as a game, it's presented as if it's all so gosh-hard, and that you're brilliant for getting through each stage.

But getting through this nonsense requires you to tap the screen. You tap three times and you've gone from something called Common, though to something called Rare, because apparently you're so special and not everyone can count to three.

You get some reward for that, but who cares? It's pointless aggravation, and more so than even the advertising.

That advertising does seem to be a little dodgy, though. I don't mean that ads are usually for games that look awful, I mean in the way that Duolingo runs ads for itself, pushing you to sign up to the paid version.

It would, of course, but it often says things like "subscribers are 4.7 times more likely to finish the course." Any time anyone quotes any statistic to you without a source, they are lying.

In this case, if there is an actual finish to the Duolingo Piano course, I don't believe anyone has found it.

I do feel I'm being harsh since Duolingo was once singled out by Apple for being one of the best iPhone apps. But I'm not being unfair: that award was in 2013.

Since then, the company has turned to AI and if this isn't its last irritation, it's the last one I want to get off my chest.

Somehow Duolingo Piano can be wrong. It's got to be spectacularly wrong for someone of my appallingly poor standard to notice, but it is and I do.

Sometimes it's a programming error, such as when it asks you to drag notes to an image of a keyboard and incorrectly says you're wrong. Or when you're doing match the note letters to the stave and it just isn't right.

It is galling the way it will then say "Let's fix a few mistakes" and it means yours, not its own.

Yet Duolingo somehow keeps me coming back to its piano lessons. But it is shocking to me how often I end a lesson by force-quitting the app because it's the only way to get out of a stupid game, or an unwanted connection to some random other user.

If you can still face it, Duolingo Piano is a free app. There's a subscription option that costs $96 per year, and that removes the ads.

There is also an actual Duolingo Piano, I mean a branded keyboard. I have that, I like it more than I like the app, but still you should look for something else.

Buying a piano

You don't need a piano to use Duolingo Piano, you can do it all by tapping on your iPhone screen. For that matter, you could just mess around with Garageband.

Simply Piano requires an actual keyboard, though. And really, so do you. A physical piano keyboard is crucial, and I think that so much that I've ended up with two.

One is that physical Duolingo Piano, which a 37-key piano keyboard made by Loog. You can say a lot in praise of this, since it feels good to play even if the keys are also a little short.

Plus the ability to connect it to your iPhone and iPad with a USB-C cable is excellent. Although as I say, a daily lesson will typically be under 60 seconds, so you can often spend more time connecting and disconnecting.

The issue with the Duolingo Piano is that it currently costs $250 from Amazon. I got my order in early, when it was first announced and there may have been some kind of early bird discount.

I don't remember, though, because if there were, the saving was eaten up by the cost of having to import it from the maker to where I am in England. It is now available in the UK and it's also on Amazon US.

However, I've had it now for most of the 520 days I've been following the Duolingo app's piano teaching, yet I've only done a few dozen lessons on it.

Whereas I'd say there's only been maybe five days in the last eight weeks where I did not use my newer piano. Last Christmas, I was given an Oyayo 88-key folding piano and, okay, it being a present made it a lot less costly to me than the Duolingo model.

Except it's also a lot less costly and I didn't half drop a lot of hints about precisely which one I wanted after a great deal of research. If Santa hadn't obliged, I would've bought it myself on December 26, and it would've cost me $107 from Amazon.

I'm conscious that I know nothing and that all the reviews I read or watched may have come down on this Oyayo model as being the best, but only for certain uses. I didn't understand the technical details of what they said, but I gathered that it's best for people learning.

Since I am learning, I'm fine with that and I relish this keyboard. My piano teacher said she'd never heard of a folding one before, but then she wouldn't need to since she was the most gorgeous baby grand in her living room.

I'd put you in touch with her if her schedule weren't already full, and if I knew you could pop over to England.

What I can do is say that apparently in the US, you can expect to pay a teacher between $30 and around $100 per hour. So my weekly half-hour lessons would add up to between $780 and $5,200 per year in the States.

That's undeniably a good reason to use apps instead. But let me give you one example of how a real-life teacher is better than an app.

If you are already a pianist, then thank you for reading this far, and here's a thing you definitely already know that I did not. If you play a scale with your right hand, you start with your thumb on Middle C, then your next finger plays D, and the next presses E.

But then you tuck your thumb underneath so that it's your thumb that plays F. Your fingers then get to press G, A, B, and the next C.

Fine. As I say, simple and obvious once you know, but in over 500 days of Duolingo Piano, I did not have one thin clue that this was needed. That it was something so basic.

I don't think it's fair to criticize an app when, yet again, I am such a beginner. But before I got my teacher, I was peculiarly afraid of touching a piano keyboard, afraid of playing the wrong note.

Now I have it next to my desk and I'm not going to say I stroke the keys lovingly, but only because then you'd know.

What I will say is that on the very busiest of days, on in fact the worst of days, a 15-minute piano practice feels cleansing. I'm going to ditch Duolingo Piano now and enjoy learning properly, even if at the moment I can only aspire to playing "Chopsticks."