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!

Dynamics are a fundamental part of reading and performing music. They guide the volume that we play and they give us a great deal of information about how the music is supposed to feel. However, dynamics are often not quite as detailed and helpful as you may expect.

Many people believe that learning and playing the piano requires a large amount of multitasking. Although we do occasionally have to do some amount of multitasking, it doesn’t play as big of a role as you may think. ..

We are now 2 days away from Christmas and for many musicians (particularly piano players) it is a time to dust of the Christmas music and entertain the family, community or ourselves with some of the classic tunes that everyone loves…

If you have ever played a piece of music on the piano by reading sheet music, you will likely have experience of memorising the music. For most of us, this happens accidentally as you repeat sections of the music over and over again. There is, however, one small problem with this…

When trying to compose or write music, one of the biggest challenges is working out how to approach the writing process. How do you come up with ideas? How do you put those ideas into a suitable format? How do you keep it interesting? These are the questions that make up the music writing process. So let’s try to answer them!

Being able to hear notes, note relationships and chord qualities is a fundamental part of being a musician. It is an even more fundamental skill for playing by ear or improvising.

Inversions are a music theory concept that is widely taught to music students as a way of understanding that the notes that make up a chord can be moved around.

The lesson usually looks something like this:

In many of these articles I have mentioned that much of music plays with the idea of familiarity. The more familiar a listener is with a musical idea, the more they feel comfortable listening to it and can predict what is going to happen next. This is why pop music tends to use a repeating four chord sequence and the chorus comes back several times with little change. However, it can be difficult to strike a balance between “familiar” and “boring”.

There are many ways that we can make a piece of music sound more interesting to listen to. One nice way to make music sound more interesting is by using borrowed chords. A borrowed chord is a chord that doesn’t belong to the key or the scale that the piece of music is using. Let’s say we have a piece of music in the key of G major, if we take a chord that doesn’t belong to the key of G major then we can consider this a borrowed chord taken from a different scale or key. Unlike a key change or a modulation, borrowed chords are typically for just a single chord and don’t change the general key of the piece of music.

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!