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…

Music is a unique form of art. Just by playing certain sounds in a specific order you can create a rather intense emotional reaction. This is why it is often used in movies as a kind of emotional enhancement and also why it is entertaining to go and watch an artist reproduce the music live on stage even if they aren’t doing anything visually interesting…

Related keys are an often neglected concept but appear surprisingly often within music. If a piece of music moves to a new key, the vast majority of the time it is moving to a related key. So knowing what those related keys are can really help you understand what is happening. It also opens up some interesting options if you are writing a piece of music or improvising…

There are several different types of learners when it comes to learning an instrument. There are those that want to make sure that they don’t miss anything that could potentially be helpful to them, with the aim of becoming a holistically competent player. Then there are those that only want to know what they have to know in order to be able to do the thing that they want to do…

There are many terms in music that are used to describe certain techniques or concepts. So today I thought I would provide some of this terms for you…

There are many ways to practice the piano and sometimes your practice may look very different to other times depending on what your current goals are. However, for those that lack structure in their practice or are just starting out and don’t know what to do, I would recommend the 20-20-60 method…

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…