Somewhere around the third or fourth month, most adult beginners write to me with the same message in different words: it was going well, and now it has stopped. Pieces that were coming together have fallen apart. Things I could do last month I cannot do this month. Perhaps this was always going to happen.
It is so consistent that I now mention it in advance, because knowing what it is removes most of its force.
What is actually happening
Three things arrive at once, and they arrive together for structural reasons.
Your ear has improved faster than your hands. This is the main one. Three months of concentrated listening sharpens your judgement considerably, and judgement improves faster than physical skill does. So you are now hearing faults that were always there and that you previously could not detect. The playing has not got worse. The listener has got better, and the listener is you. This is genuinely good news wearing an unpleasant disguise.
The easy gains are spent. The first weeks contain a run of large, visible wins: the first time both hands work together, the first recognizable tune. Those are step changes and they run out. What follows is the same rate of real progress spread over smaller, less visible increments — which feels like stopping even though nothing has stopped.
The music has started to require two things at once. Around here, pieces begin asking you to read, keep time, and control the sound simultaneously. Each was manageable alone. Together they exceed what you can currently run in parallel, so the whole performance degrades and it looks like a loss of ability. It is a load problem.
What to change
Take the load apart. If three things at once is too much, do them one at a time on purpose. Clap and count the rhythm with no keyboard at all. Play the notes with no rhythm, just finding them. Then play slowly enough that all of it fits. Slow is not a lesser version of the piece; slow is the speed at which you can still control it, and that speed rises on its own.
Go back to something from month one and play it. This is the most useful thing on this list and the one people resist hardest, because it feels like retreating. Do it anyway. You will find it easy in a way it was not, and that is the objective evidence your ear is currently refusing to supply. It also gives you the sensation of playing well, which you have not had for a few weeks and which is the actual fuel here.
Record yourself, once, and put it beside a recording from two months ago. Memory is not a reliable instrument for this. A recording is. Most people are surprised, and the surprise is what breaks the mood.
Shorten the sessions. A discouraged person practicing for an hour is mostly rehearsing discouragement. Twenty focused minutes is better in every respect.
Change one thing about the material. A different key, a piece from outside the book, a tune you find by ear. The plateau is partly attentional, and novelty restores attention.
What not to do
Do not practice more. More repetitions of an unsolved problem install the problem more firmly. This is the reflex, and it is wrong.
Do not add a harder piece to prove something. It will confirm the fear rather than dispel it.
Do not decide anything about your talent this month. You are making a judgement about a long-term prospect using data from the single least representative period in it.
How long it lasts
I will not give you a number, because it varies with what you do about it and I do not invent figures. What I will say is that it ends, that the ending is usually not dramatic, and that in retrospect nearly everyone describes this stretch as the point where their playing actually became musical — because it is where you stopped hitting notes and started listening to them.
The lessons are free and they stay up, so going back three of them costs nothing. And if you want to know whether what you are hearing is real, send me a recording — feedback is free while the pilot runs, and this is precisely the question it is good at answering.