Keys are one of the fundamentals of music and are amongst the first things that many players learn. Typically that’s via the proxy of learning what key signatures look like or by learning scales. However, key signatures play a much more interesting role in demonstrating how music actually works and the web behind the logic of music theory.

It’s always fascinated me how one note in one context can feel completely different to the same note in another context. It’s easy to assume that notes determine the feeling of a piece of music. For those that watch my videos or read these Monday Music Tips regularly, you will also know that I talk a lot about how different types of chords often determine the feeling of a piece of music. However, that isn’t strictly true.

When writing these Monday Music Tips, I’m always in search of the most valuable thing I can write about to help improve your playing and understanding of music. The truth is, learning an instrument is made up of many different things that you need to learn at different stages of the process. However, there is one thing that I think is the single most impactful change any musician can make.

When I was much younger, I believed that practising more always meant more improvement. So much so that I lived by the thought, “If I’m not practising, then someone else is, and they are getting better than me.” Clearly, I wasn’t competitive at all!

It’s pretty widely known that around 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail before reaching February. However, what is less widely known is why!

For many players there is a big difference between what you can do in practice by yourself and what you can do when a teacher or an audience is watching. At home, you are relaxed and not “performing”, whereas when you are in a lesson or a performance your brain shifts from a more exploratory, creative mode to a preservation and performance mode. I too have experienced this many times and I also used to say in my lessons, “I played this better earlier.”

One of the most impactful techniques I use when both practicing myself and teaching students is to approach a piece from both ends. Early on in my playing career I would typically start a piece at the beginning and slowly but surely work my way to the end of the piece bar-by-bar. However, a teacher of mine once suggested learning the final phrase of the piece of music and working backwards one phrase at a time as well. Now, this is a fundamental part of how I approach a piece of music.

Over the course of my playing career, I’ve learnt hundreds of pieces to a performable level. Yet, if you asked me right now to play even a handful of those pieces in a performance, I would inevitably make a big mess of it! There are even some pieces that I have recordings of, but I can’t remember learning them and looking at the sheet music feels like seeing a new piece for the first time.

With Halloween weekend having just happened, what better time to talk about what makes music sound scary! Most people’s experiences (including my own) of scary music are usually related to film (although not exclusively). Having said that, there have also been many pieces that were originally stand alone pieces but later popularised by horror movies.

As a teenager, I often played the piano in bands. I played the guitar and piano in a jazz band (not simultaneously), and I often played in various pop/rock bands for events. However, at that time there wasn’t an easy way to quickly find sheet music for the songs I wanted to learn, and even if there was, I would have been terrible at reading it! So I needed to find a way of playing the songs on the piano with very little information, sometimes by just listening to the song, other times by working from just the chord chart.

When I was 11, much of my music learning was focused on what would make me look cool and impress people. I hadn’t yet had a piano lesson and so I was just teaching myself some hard pieces by listening to them and occasionally trying to decipher some notation. The aim was always to go into school the next day and play obnoxiously loud in a practice room with the door open so people really knew I was the coolest guy around.

In 2019, I was on the music education front lines. I spent the vast majority of my week teaching lots of students, and my music school had hundreds of students attending various music lessons each week. There were lots of students at any one time hoping to take their instrumental exams, and so each term/semester I would run mock exam sessions where I would spend the weekend examining students (both my own and other teachers’ students)…

Over the years I have heard perhaps thousands of times that a player feels like they have a weaker hand when playing the piano. It’s often the left hand that feels weaker (although not always), and it will often be attributed to being right-handed (if the player is right-handed). If they aren’t, then usually I hear that their right hand is stronger because they’ve used it more…

In 2010–2012, as well as playing the piano, I also had a fascination with playing fingerstyle guitar. I had watched guitarists such as Andy McKee, Don Ross, and Tommy Emmanuel and thought that their playing was “pretty sick” (in the good sense). So I spent far too many hours teaching myself some of their songs and arrangements…

Many times in these “Monday Music Tips” I have mentioned how I managed to dramatically decrease the amount of time I was practicing during my time at the music conservatory. I created my own planning book that allowed me to time block the specific things I needed to get done within a practice session…

For many players, fitting practice around life isn’t always simple. 2018 turned out to be one of the busiest years I’ve ever had. I was running a music school, juggling teachers and students who needed my attention, while also personally teaching more than 40 students each week. At the same time, I was performing far more frequently than I do today. This meant that although I definitely needed to practice, finding time to do so was much more difficult. It usually ended up happening in short bursts between lessons or whenever a teaching room happened to be free…

In 2014, I was sitting in a hotel room in Cardiff, Wales. There were only 2 hours left before an important performance where I would be playing a one hour programme from memory. Unfortunately, many hotels don’t come equipped with a piano in each of the rooms and I didn’t think it was a great idea to travel with a piano in my hand luggage…

When I first started learning the piano, I actually started by learning the keyboard, two similar but distinct instruments! I was 7 years old and I was already trying to learn the guitar and viola, so why not give myself more things to do and try to learn the keyboard as well…

Every piece of music (besides the weird contemporary stuff), uses a key, and not just any key, but a major or a minor key. This is because the notes in a key all have a particular relationships to one another that allow us to form chords and melodies easily without too much dissonance…

Having taught the piano for the past 15 years, I’ve noticed the same common pitfalls repeatedly appear in many players’ practice. Sometimes when we are learning the piano we have to fight against our brains natural urge to take the easy option or to do the thing that requires the least mental resistance…