What Are Related Keys and Why You Should Know Them!
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

What Are Related Keys and Why You Should Know Them!

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…

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Does Music Theory Limit Creativity?
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

Does Music Theory Limit Creativity?

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…

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Practice Tips for Better Piano Playing
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

Practice Tips for Better Piano Playing

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…

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How Roman Numerals Are Used in Music
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

How Roman Numerals Are Used in Music

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…

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Tips for Learning to Improvise on the Piano
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

Tips for Learning to Improvise on the Piano

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…

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How to Regain Motivation for the Piano
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

How to Regain Motivation for the Piano

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…

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How to use Pedal Point to Learn Chords
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

How to use Pedal Point to Learn Chords

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?…

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Why Learn to Read Music?
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

Why Learn to Read Music?

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?”…

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What is Functional Harmony and Why is it Important?
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

What is Functional Harmony and Why is it Important?

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…

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Why You Don’t Need to Know Every Scale to be Creative
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

Why You Don’t Need to Know Every Scale to be Creative

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…

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Why the Same Chord Can Sound Totally Different in a Song
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

Why the Same Chord Can Sound Totally Different in a Song

It is often said (even by myself) that major chords sound “happy” and minor chords sound “sad”. Of course, this is quite a simplification! In reality, chords can have different and very specific feelings within a piece of music, and this is because of many different factors…

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How to Use the Sustain pedal Properly
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

How to Use the Sustain pedal Properly

One of the biggest mysteries for many pianists is when and why we use the pedals on the piano. While many are aware of the sustain pedal and may even use the pedal frequently, it’s a feature of the piano that is often not explicitly taught or explained by teachers. So…here I am to the rescue!…

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The Key to Creating a Richer Sound
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

The Key to Creating a Richer Sound

There are many forms of art that we have in the world, including movies, TV shows, paintings, apparel, website design, interior design, and many others. Unlike “interior design”, for example, music is largely a representational form of art, meaning that we are trying to “represent” a feeling, a story, or an idea using sound…

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The Secret to Playing Fast Isn’t About Speed at All
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

The Secret to Playing Fast Isn’t About Speed at All

There are many occasions during the process of learning the piano where you might be required to play at a speed that is not only a technical challenge but also a mental challenge. In other words, in order to play at speed, you need to be able to physically move fast enough, and you need your brain to keep up…

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How Learning Less Can Make You a Better Pianist
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

How Learning Less Can Make You a Better Pianist

When I was a mere child, not only was I a much wider child than I was tall…but I also spent the vast majority of my time listening to songs and making an attempt at reproducing them on the piano. To do this, I’d roughly work out the chords and then the melody, and I would try mashing them together rather unsuccessfully…

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The Secret to Expressive Piano Playing
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

The Secret to Expressive Piano Playing

Around 10 years ago I spent the vast majority of my week teaching students how to play the piano. One lesson would be a 4 year old that just wanted to run around the room. The next lesson would be a 75 year old that has some spare time and always wanted to learn the piano. Yet over the past 15 years, one thing I have consistently noticed is that at some point, most people starts practicing like a robot…

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How Amateur Pianists Can Sound Like Professionals
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

How Amateur Pianists Can Sound Like Professionals

This past Friday I took a trip to Roy Thomsons Hall in Toronto to watch Jan Lisiecki play Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 alongside the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. While I was listening and thinking about the score (like a loser) I had two realisations:

Firstly, I was providing a community service by single handedly bringing the age demographic down by quite the margin…

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5 Myths About Learning Piano
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

5 Myths About Learning Piano

Before starting to learn the piano, there are many assumptions that beginners have. Some of these are entirely accurate; however, there are many that are much less accurate and might set you on the wrong path.

So here are some myths to make sure your expectations meet the reality of learning the piano…

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How to Conquer Stage Fright and Play with Confidence
Matthew Cawood Matthew Cawood

How to Conquer Stage Fright and Play with Confidence

The fear of performance is a fear that is shared by both learning and experienced musicians alike. The difference is that experienced musicians become accustomed to the feeling and have built enough evidence that this feeling isn’t going to affect their performance…

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