Free Piano Lessons For Kids and Beginners

Last year, we were blessed with a beautiful gift from my parents.  They gave us a Roland digital piano.  This was in my home as a child and so it is a good 20+ years old, but it is still just as good!

You can see this piano on the left of this picture from our 20-mintue Quick Clean Challenge

Alex plays piano a little, and so we have used it a little here and there.  But our girls really wanted to start learning.  We don’t have the money budgeted right now to accommodate piano lessons, but I wanted to find a way to let them start learning.  I was the violin player in my family and I never did learn more than just very basic piano skills.

So I started doing some online research on Google and on YouTube (we’ve talked about YouTube being the Thrifty answer for many DIY and How To’s) and found out that there are quite a few resources.

First, our girls have started using the FreePianoLessons4Kids.com with many short beginner lessons that are free to watch and learn.  After the first day, our girls were playing basic songs like Mary Had a Little Lamb, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, etc. It was so great to hear real (basic) songs and not just piano noise!

As supplemental resources, we have found these YouTube Piano Lesson channels to be helpful for our girls as well:

• The Piano Chord Book YouTube Channel
• PianoLessons.com YouTube Channel
• Furmanczyk Piano Academy YouTube Channel
• Free Basic Printable Music Sheets

There is probably free online music lessons and YouTube channels for pretty much any instrument your child (or you!) may be interested in playing. Just search on YouTube for the specific instrument lessons and we are sure you will find something!

Now, I don’t think something like this can replace advanced lessons, or a certain point of skills (I could be wrong as we are still at the very basics) but I think options like this are good in these cases:

• To gauge the seriousness your child has towards learning how to play the piano
• To “test” whether or not your child likes to play before investing in lessons
• To be a little further along by the time they start formal lessons and get ahead (saving money by learning the basics at home too instead of for many dollars per hour!)
• To be the musical starting point while your child figures out what instrument they ultimately want to master. What I mean is that we have discussed how a basic piano knowledge is a good sound board for having that musical foundation as they start to play the violin, guitar, trumpet, anything! Both Alex and I learned piano basics before I went on to violin and he went on to play the Trumpet.  Alex’s piano skills today are much better than mine, but it does provide a good musical foundation even if they decide to master a different instrument later.

Have you tried online lessons before?  What was your experience?