Whenever I teach sight reading, I always encourage my students to analyze their music before they start to play. But that’s hard for them to do without knowing a little bit about the key they’re working in.
This usually requires us to pull out the music theory books.

But teaching music theory out of a book is very frustrating for me as a teacher for two reasons.

When you're experimenting with piano rhythm patterns, at some point you're going to encounter chords that have black keys in them.

It's really common for piano beginners to avoid chords that have black keys — but is that really necessary?

Once you've gotten comfortable playing my favourite rhythm pattern for piano beginners, you may be interested in taking your playing to the next level.

In today's video, I show you how you can start to experiment with chord inversions to make your rhythm pattern even nicer to play!

When students ask me about learning to write music, I tend to start with the same advice, so I thought I'd collect that advice into a short video in case it helps you along your songwriting journey!

Major 3rds play a really important role in piano music, and can help you play music faster, yet they’re rarely discussed outside of formal music theory.

Today, let’s give them the attention they deserve!

Improving your piano skills doesn't have to be tedious! This is a message I want to shout from the rooftops. There are actually lots of fun ways to improve your practice, if you're willing to think outside the box.

It’s really common for my piano students to just start reading a piece of music from the beginning, with no preparation or planning. But just launching into sight reading with no preparation is an easy way to get lost and frustrated.

You can set yourself up for breezier success if you find some relationships between your notes before you start to play.

When we're constantly challenging ourselves and trying new things at our pianos, it can be easy to start thinking that our piano journey is nothing but one big struggle. But I want to encourage you to purposefully build times of rest or relief into your piano practice.

I've noticed a misconception that learning your piano pieces better is the key to becoming comfortable with performance.

While it's certainly important to know your pieces well, performance is actually an entirely different skill that needs to be developed separately.