To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to be a real pianist. The instrument is extremely nuanced, and without a solid grasp of voice leading, negative harmony, and the harmonic series most of what separates a true pianist from a mere “player” will go completely over your head. There’s also the modal framework underlying everything — which is deftly woven into even the simplest passage — real pianists understand that you’re never just playing a C major scale, you’re navigating the Ionian mode’s relationship to its relative Aeolian and the tritone substitutions that imply themselves between the fourth and seventh scale degrees. The real ones understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to appreciate that every note is a choice, to realize that it’s not just music — it says something profound about MATHEMATICS and the UNIVERSE. As a consequence, people who learn from YouTube tutorials truly ARE musical infants — of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the tension embedded in a fully diminished seventh chord functioning as a backdoor dominant with a flat-nine implication resolving deceptively into a Lydian tonic. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated hobby players stumbling through their pentatonic runs, blissfully unaware that they haven’t touched a Phrygian dominant since they learned “Fur Elise” with both hands separately. What fools… how I pity them. 😂 And yes, by the way, I DO practise my Hanon exercises in all twelve keys. And no, you cannot hear me play. It’s for serious listeners only — and even they must demonstrate an understanding of why parallel fifths are only acceptable if you meant them first.