In my personal experience but also having observed other people try to find magical shortcuts, watching tutorials, guides and following different courses that never seem to satisfy your thirst for a fast-track, imo this is the way to do it.

And it will be tedious

And it will feel like meaningless or at least extremely boring. Until?
Until you begin to see/hear patterns.

That is the moment when a whole new dimension opens up in front of your eyes.

 

Hello, I just read the last posts and just want to say or encourage that learning to reed sheet music is actually very easy. It should not take any longer than 2 weeks to learn both the bass and violin clefs you need for piano. Guitar maybe is a little bit more complicated than piano, but learning to read sheet music is not really a hard task. Practice on an instrument is much harder. If you know sheet music you can read all compositions, thats a huge advantage. But if you're playing mostly by ear and you can make everything you want, you don't really need music theory. But it's still a very good skill to be able to read music. You can read notes and imagine the sound in your head, that's really handy.

 

There is no best. Tutorials are usually misleading. Playing the piano, or any other instruments, cannot be taught. If you look at it from a simple player's perspective, what you end up getting is some fingering techniques or ways to learn pre-made pieces.
Reaching the state of a professional composer cannot be taught with formal music theory or by watching other musicians play musical instruments. If these things could be taught, everyone on the planet would be a skilled musician by now. Today's music theories, which have been designed based on the fantasy imaginations of theorists who were unaware of how music works, have many flaws, and reading or learning them only limits your thinking. The thoughts of composers cannot be theorized, and anyone who tries to theorize and introduce mental models for them has failed from the beginning. The cause of all this chaos in the world of music is the flawed thinking of music theorists, who have misled millions on the planet with their flawed thinking. Everyone thinks that if they learn theories from books, or from YouTube channels that teach these things, or even attend classes from expensive instructors or even have some personal experiments by themselves, they can become professional musicians like the great composers of past centuries. Such thinking is completely wrong. Even the composers of past centuries themselves could not explain what they did, let alone theorists who love to theorize. Music cannot be theorized or taught by any means.