A viewer of my previous video “My favourite rhythm pattern for beginner piano players” requested a video demonstrating how to add the sustain pedal to this rhythm pattern. I’m thrilled that my viewers want to take on extra challenges, so here it is!

Playing along with your favourite songs is the best way to learn piano, but it can be difficult to get started if you don’t know what to do with your hands.

Today I’m sharing a really simple piano accompaniment pattern that’s easy to learn but has a huge range of applications if you want to play music by ear.

Let’s get you comfortable using the sustain pedal!

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use the pedal, including an exercise that will help you learn to use it smoothly even if you’ve never used it before!

This week, I’m trying something new and adding song tutorials to my social media. I’m doing this because I notice a lack of online piano tutorials for true beginners to piano. Most people who create video tutorials for piano move through their songs pretty quickly, assuming the viewer has some background in piano. They don’t explain each step very clearly and I felt that left a lot of learners behind!

Here’s a collection of tutorials that are written for true beginners. Even if you’ve never played a song before, you should be able to follow along.

Now that we know a about what a key signature is, it can be helpful to learn a little more about how we use them. Here’s a video describing the difference between major and minor keys. If you prefer to read your content, here is a written summary of that video.

Sometimes when we want our music to sound a certain way, we need to use a combination of white keys and black keys. Notes that are written on a staff are always white keys by default. So how do we fix this?

I got a comment on my last video on naming landmark notes where a person shared the way that they learned notes in the treble and bass clefs, using the popular sayings like “All Cows Eat Grass”, “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge”, and so on. This made me realize that perhaps some of you wonder, do I use those sayings at all?

The answer is basically no! I don’t really like using those sayings in teaching people how to read music and I find I don’t even really need to! Here’s why.

We’ve talked about landmark notes a bunch on this site lately because they’re my favourite way to teach my students how to feel comfortable around the musical staff. First I showed you how to find middle C. Then I showed you two really valuable landmark notes on each staff — treble G and bass F.

Today I’d like to show you two more landmark notes that will expand your ability to read music near the middle of the treble and bass staff - high C and low C!

The last time I talked about the musical staff, I showed you how we can use the pattern of line-space-line-space to start from middle C and count our way up to find the lowest note on the treble clef and the highest note on the bass clef. Today I’d like to show you two more notes on each staff and explain why these new notes are so valuable to beginner piano players.