One of the best indications in a piece of music as to how the music is going to feel is the relationship between time signatures and meter. Many musicians will be very familiar with time signatures, yet meter is often something that is misunderstood or neglected.

As many will undoubtedly know, learning to play the piano requires consistent practice over a long period of time. Learning any skill is a mixture of two types of learning, learning the information and learning the physical motor skills.

We will have all experienced learning information before, this is typically how we learn at school! The teacher tells you some stuff and then you remember the stuff. A good student does this by revising and doing exercises that use the new information. A bad student (like myself) will...

Have you ever noticed that there are some musicians that are only able to play pieces that they have spent time learning and there are other musicians that are able to just sit down at the piano and make music? Both types of musician may have an equal understanding of music, yet one is more naturally able to access that information in any situation.

Throughout the last 15 years of teaching piano I have regularly come across two distinctly different types of player; the player that will commit to a piece of music until they have played it to death...and the player that can’t commit to learning a piece of music at all and wants to move on to something new every week.

Learning an instrument is a difficult challenge and it’s often compounded by the expectations that we put on ourselves and the desire to get to a particular level of competence. However, it isn’t quite as simple as you might think because there is a lot that goes into learning an instrument. This can be broken into two parts; learning to physically play the instrument and learning how music works.

For those that have attempted to learn the piano, it becomes immediately obvious that technique is an issue that needs to be overcome. For many, 4th and 5th fingers don’t want to cooperate, you might have a hard time jumping around and finding the notes on the piano and playing scales evenly is a challenge that takes some time to master. Confronted with an inability to actually physically play the piano, we naturally spend most of our time trying to solve these issues through scales, exercises and repeatedly playing sections of pieces that contain some technical difficulties - and rightly so!

It should come as no surprise that I believe that quotes can be a powerful tool. I include them at the start of each “Monday Music Tips” after all! Words (much like notes within music) are incredibly important and when presented with the right perspective at the right time, it can change your view of the world and perhaps even change how you operate within it.

So here are some lessons, quotes and important perspectives on music from some of the greatest pianists of all time!

Playing and listening to music is an inherently emotional experience and the emotions that are being conveyed is determined by many factors. One moment the music may be quiet and the next, it might be loud. Another section may be using low pitched notes and then it might change to a higher pitched section.

Repetition is not only a key feature of music, but it permeates every part of music creation. There are actually many reasons for this and these reasons can help us understand music much better and perhaps even inform us as to how to approach playing music if we can work out why the repetition is being used!

When writing music there is an endless amount of possibilities as to what you can write. Every chord choice and melody note tells us something new. Yet, when you come to learn about music theory, it can appear like there aren’t really that many options. There are 7 notes in a scale and there are 7 triads to choose from (sometimes with some extra notes added to those triads for some extra spice).

Throughout my many years learning, recording and performing music, there have been many occasions where I have been required to play various instruments other than the piano.

I have played the saxophone in concert bands, the guitar in jazz bands and various other bands, the violin, viola and cello in orchestras and string quartets, the mandolin and ukulele in folk recordings and I’ve also played the drums and bass guitar in rock bands.

One of the most important symbols to understand when learning to read music is the various clefs that you will come across. Unlike many symbols in music reading, a clef can leave you playing the completely wrong notes if you aren’t familiar with them.

So what actually is a clef?

Well, a clef is a symbol that is at the start of each line (system) in a piece of music. There are 4 main clefs that are important to understand; treble, bass, tenor and alto clefs!

Understanding music theory is incredibly advantageous when it comes to reading or hearing a piece of music and being able to fully understand and interpret what you are playing.

When I first started my journey in music, I was of the mindset that I just wanted to play music and didn’t feel like there was any reason to overcomplicate it. However, later on in my playing career I came to realise that without any way of understanding and interpreting music, you become reliant on others to tell you how to play. Which can mean that you never fully connect to what you are doing or why you are doing it!

Sight reading is the ability to instantly read and play a piece of music that you haven’t seen before. It is a difficult skill to master and it can be a very frustrating one to learn. However, this is often because players put a lot of pressure on what is required for building the skill and zero focus on actually practicing it!

Arranging music can be a fun way of playing some of your favourite pieces of music and making them your own. Not only are you able to completely change the style and sound of a song, but you can also change the instrumentation to any instruments that you want.

But…how do you actually do it? How do you approach it?

Practicing an instrument is a fine balance between under-practicing and over-practicing. If you don’t practice enough then the chances are that you aren’t going to progress as quickly as you could, you may even find that you don’t progress at all. Whereas if you over-practice then you can start making mistakes that you wouldn’t usually make, which can undo a lot of the work you have put in so far and it can feel quite demoralising.

At the beginning of learning an instrument, contrary to popular belief, there is actually no single obvious path that you can take. There are many ways to approach learning and many routes that you might want to take to best achieve your goals. In the past, most teachers and method books would go through the process of learning the piano in much the same way. First you learn to read notes, some basic scales and theory along the way and then you slowly integrate pieces that are progressively more challenging…until you are a piano genius! This is still an great way of learning, however, I would argue that today many piano learners have different goals and no longer wish to learn in this way and it’s not always necessary or the best method either.

At the beginning of learning the piano there is a lot to learn; what the notes on the piano are, how to read notes and note rhythms, how to get your fingers to cooperate with you and some of the theory behind how we understand music. So, at the very beginning it can be very exciting because not only do we already have the motivation to learn, but we are also taking on so much information and we can see how we are improving day-by-day.

One of the most common reasons that those new to learning an instrument often feel like they aren’t progressing as fast as they could be, is because being able to practice well is a skill within itself. Not only that, but there are many practicing traps that a new learner can fall into and it can become difficult to start changing your routine and the way that you approach practicing.

So how could you actually practice in order to get better as efficiently as possible? What needs to be included in a practice session and why?

When learning music, minor scales and minor keys can be a confusing topic. Although many musicians begin with learning major scales and keys, when it comes time to venture into the realm of minor…it ain’t so simple! So hopefully in this post I’m going to explain and demystify the difference between major and minor and what the different types of minor scales mean!

In music, when a piece of music is in a major key and therefore using a major scale, there is only one set of notes to worry about. Let’s say we have a piece of music that is in the key of C major, this piece of music will be using notes from a C major scale - which are C D E F G A B. All of the melodies and chords will be made up from these notes that make up the C major scale.