Roman Numerals are often used within music as a way of understanding chords. You most often see them in classical music analysis or in music theory books as a means of understanding chords…

Improvising is essentially applied music theory and it is one of the greatest ways to test your musical ability. This means that it is a great way to work out whether you know a concept or you REALLY understand the concept…

Motivation is an interesting subject. We all know what it feels like to be highly motivated and driven towards something, and we all know what it feels like to slowly lose the motivation and find it more and more difficult to keep going. I have noticed over the years that it is around this time of year that many people start to lose the motivation as summer approaches and we get further and further away from the New Year’s resolutions…

There are few things that I enjoy more on the piano than improvising and using pedal point. It’s a unique trick that plays on the idea that we like to latch on to the familiar when listening to music. So, what is pedal point?…

Over the past several years, I have made many videos on reading sheet music, learning to sight-read, and the difficulties I and many others have faced when learning to read. Yet, one of the most frequent comments on these videos is the question: “Do I really need to learn to read music?”…

Harmony is one of the fundamental building blocks of music (alongside melodies). It determines how the piece of music feels and whether it sounds satisfying or not. Harmony, in simple terms, is just chords - it's the relationship between the notes that are being played…

Scales are a fundamental part of music. They are what we use in order to write music and understand the music that we are playing. For example, if a piece of music is in the key of G major, then knowing a G major scale will mean that we know which notes are going to be used in that piece of music…

It is often said (even by myself) that major chords sound “happy” and minor chords sound “sad”. Of course, this is quite a simplification! In reality, chords can have different and very specific feelings within a piece of music, and this is because of many different factors…

One of the biggest mysteries for many pianists is when and why we use the pedals on the piano. While many are aware of the sustain pedal and may even use the pedal frequently, it’s a feature of the piano that is often not explicitly taught or explained by teachers. So…here I am to the rescue!…

There are many forms of art that we have in the world, including movies, TV shows, paintings, apparel, website design, interior design, and many others. Unlike “interior design”, for example, music is largely a representational form of art, meaning that we are trying to “represent” a feeling, a story, or an idea using sound…

There are many occasions during the process of learning the piano where you might be required to play at a speed that is not only a technical challenge but also a mental challenge. In other words, in order to play at speed, you need to be able to physically move fast enough, and you need your brain to keep up…

When I was a mere child, not only was I a much wider child than I was tall…but I also spent the vast majority of my time listening to songs and making an attempt at reproducing them on the piano. To do this, I’d roughly work out the chords and then the melody, and I would try mashing them together rather unsuccessfully…

Around 10 years ago I spent the vast majority of my week teaching students how to play the piano. One lesson would be a 4 year old that just wanted to run around the room. The next lesson would be a 75 year old that has some spare time and always wanted to learn the piano. Yet over the past 15 years, one thing I have consistently noticed is that at some point, most people starts practicing like a robot…

This past Friday I took a trip to Roy Thomsons Hall in Toronto to watch Jan Lisiecki play Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 alongside the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. While I was listening and thinking about the score (like a loser) I had two realisations:

Firstly, I was providing a community service by single handedly bringing the age demographic down by quite the margin…

Before starting to learn the piano, there are many assumptions that beginners have. Some of these are entirely accurate; however, there are many that are much less accurate and might set you on the wrong path.

So here are some myths to make sure your expectations meet the reality of learning the piano…

The fear of performance is a fear that is shared by both learning and experienced musicians alike. The difference is that experienced musicians become accustomed to the feeling and have built enough evidence that this feeling isn’t going to affect their performance…

As a pianist the idea of “warming up” might be a foreign concept. Many players sit down at the piano with limited time and with the aim of getting things done right from the very start. Yet our fingers and our brain are often not yet primed to make the most of a practice session and as you improve on the piano, your ability to have complete control over your physical and mental capabilities becomes increasingly important…

Having taught beyond a thousand students one-to-one over the past 15 years I have come to notice particular patterns in how different people approach learning an instrument…

If we zoom out, the pursuit of music is a very romantic pursuit. We all relate music to particular moments in our lives and given the right circumstances it can elicit quite a visceral emotional reaction. No doubt we all have the experience of playing a song on repeat 5000 times because it sounds so good! To some extent this experience is an innate feature of being a human.

Learning music and learning the piano can teach us a lot about life and help us grow as people. While all of these lessons apply to life, in the interest of helping those that are learning the piano, I’ve focused much more on how music helps us learn them!