With so many pianists starting their journey in childhood, it can feel like as adult beginners that we’ve missed the boat already. Is learning something new best left to the young? I talk to one of my students, Mike Clarke, a retired engineer in Australia about his experience.

In this video I interviewed Mike Clarke (Creative Pianist member) about his journey from guitar to piano; how raising money for charity inspired him to take up keyboard in retirement; and what he did NOT see coming!

See below for transcript!

R: Thank you so much for being a part of the community, I really enjoy seeing you participating a lot in the chats and in the forum. It's really cool to see.

M: I think it's you Ruth that actually generates that sort of enthusiasm in me, from that point of view so it's trying to reciprocate back the you know the good vibe that you put out as well. It's great and I think it's the same with a bunch of the other pianists who are in the membership, we're just sort of like feeding off each other's energy and it's really cool.

R: So what made you want to decide to learn the piano?

M: At the risk of actually feeding back a little bit more to you, it was after i saw your workshop on improv on Musical U.

I came across it i've started off first with looking, it's taken me a couple of years of retirement two or three years of retirement to get into “what do i want to do with the time that I've got now?” because you know it's retirement time!

So I've tried a few different things and you know I've got a lot more hobbies than i can fit into the week! And then it focuses down but I really want to focus on music just for my own enjoyment and just for keeping it alive – as opposed to you know going off hiking and fishing and those sort of other things which I do.

And I got a keyboard with the idea of learning how to use logic pro and just want to learn how to do a few recordings and with the idea of just making some music recordings covers to act as a backdrop for basically when I go out there maybe.

I've got this idea about going out to retirement communities and saying “look, I'll come and do an afternoon gig for you as long as you donate to the charity that i'm interested in”. Namely the Starlight Foundation for seriously ill children in hospital. It's all about busking for charity that's them drive for me.

I like playing the music but it's like I kept saying to myself “well okay it's all right sitting in your room doing but you know what am I gonna do with it?” and so that's when I got the keyboard and then I thought ‘okay just using it as a synth’ and then it went ‘okay maybe I could get this little program’ and then seriously Ruth, what clicked it was watching that workshop with you doing that improv and I thought '“Oh my gosh, I want to do some of that!”

I want to be able to do that! That is cool. Because learning your way of learning piano is just totally just blew me away! Just totally new to me, you know, I had no interest in wanting to go to a piano teacher and learn classical piano and I thought it was all hard.

You seemingly just made it very accessible and very sort of “hey i could do that!”

R: Awesome!

M: I could actually learn that! Yeah and I think that was what it was: it was like ‘hey that's accessible it's not some mystery instrument’.

I'm comfortable with strings and we're playing about on the guitar because i've just noodled around on that for many many years but never ever thought of doing the keyboard.

I think it was the improv thing and how the use of a piano can actually feed a little bit of that creative side of me as well because I've got an interest in – I play about with a few little songs and make up a few little duties: do it for the grandkids, just do it for family sometimes – make up a song just put some silly words to it… but then it just went a little bit more so that was really the start of it and then it just went from there.

Then I looked at Piano Picnic and I like the concept of bite-sized lessons, I like the site, I like the concept of moving through it, taking your own time and then when I started it, it was all so much more than learning piano.

To me it was also filling in some of those gaps on music theory that I'd never taken the trouble to do. Then dare I say it, yeah I was hooked line and sinker– I thought ‘I want to be part of this.’

R: It's so awesome, I love what you said about having the incentive to play but how it isn't about how perfect you can play something, or look at me and how great I am –you don't have to think about having that confidence because you've put a goal outside of yourself which is that, you're busking for charity!

So did you know you would be good at piano or were their doubts: were you like ‘oh I don't know if I'm gonna do this…’

M: Absolute, absolute fearful, yeah. Absolute fearful. I plunged in with both feet and my first gig was ‘The Man from Snowy River Festival’ up at Corryong. I got permission to go up there. It's a three-day festival and I just found my pitch on there, went up in the evening when nobody was around and sort of like gave it a trial run and then the next morning I was out there and just started it and after a little while I had fun. Being in lockdown I would still be very nervous going out now, in my first time and all that, but after a little while you just get there.

So just keeping things simple - it's things that maybe people could sing along to I'm not really doing a performance. The main thing that I realised I had to work on my voice was because after about an hour the voice started.

R: But you got through! What an experience! So here’s my last question:

If one of your friends was thinking about learning the piano what would be your advice for them?

Maybe they’re wondering if it was going to be too hard or whether it was going to be worth it…

M: If not now, when? Just give it a go! You don't want to end up sitting there on the rocking chair in a few years time, going “oh I should have given that a go, I wish I'd tried it.”

It really does help and complement anything that I do with music and uh and the other thing is it's fun learning something and for somebody at my age, it keeps this [brain] ticking.

R: It does, it does. There has been studies to the effect of playing any instrument, but also particularly the piano, is actually good for stuff like motor function; it can help with people who have reduced mobility in their hands and wrists; it's good for your mental health; it's good for memory; it's good for so many things!

M: It is a little challenge to look forward to but I think from the point of view of why I'm enjoying it so much – a lot of it is to do with the way that you've put together your step-by-step process and it's just the little chunks.