Learn piano to playing intermediate pieces in a year
A year of daily practice — 30 minutes a day on a single graded book, with weekly video lessons — gets an adult beginner reading both clefs and playing the easier pieces in any pop or classical anthology. Roughly 180 hours total. You will not be Glenn Gould. You will be playing real music with two hands.
12 months · ~180 hours · play "Clair de Lune" simplified or any Grade 2 piece cleanly
1.A weighted 88-key keyboard
Buy a Yamaha P-45, P-145, or used Casio Privia PX-160. Anything with fewer than 88 keys or unweighted plastic keys teaches your fingers the wrong physics — your hands will not transfer to a real piano. Get a sturdy X-stand and a sustain pedal with the keyboard. A used digital piano off Facebook Marketplace is the smartest $300 you will spend in this project.
$400–600 new, $200–350 used
Pianote's keyboard buying guide →2.Alfred's Basic Adult All-in-One Course, Book 1
The book most adult students start with for a reason. It teaches you to read both clefs from page one, introduces chords in context, and never assumes you played as a child. Work through one or two new pages a session, never skip the boring exercises, and play every piece until it sounds musical instead of correct. Books 2 and 3 will carry you another year if you want to keep going.
$20 for the spiral-bound book and CD; Books 1–3 as a bundle ~$45
Alfred's Adult All-in-One →3.Pianote — for the parts a book can't teach
A book cannot watch your hand position, fix a collapsed wrist, or show you what good fingering looks like in motion. Pianote's lesson library does. Subscribe for one year, follow Lisa Witt's beginner foundations track in parallel with the Alfred book, and book one of the included quarterly teacher feedback sessions to send a video of your hands. The free YouTube channel covers the same teachers and is enough if budget is tight.
$25/month or $200/year (free 7-day trial); their YouTube channel is free
Pianote →If you are buying this for a child
Replace everything above with Hoffman Academy. Joseph Hoffman has taught 200,000+ kids on YouTube, and the structure is built around a five-year-old's attention span: short videos, one concept at a time, optional $11/month premium for sheet music and games. For kids 5 to 12, this is the best path that exists, paid or free. Adults find it slow.
Why this path
Most adult beginners pick app-based piano (Simply Piano, Flowkey) and end up unable to read a real score. Apps gamify the easy part — pressing the right key — and skip the actual skill, which is reading two staves at once. The Alfred book forces real reading from page one. Pianote prevents you from hardwiring the hand-position habits that take years to undo. Together they are the cheapest, most boring, most reliable path to actual piano.