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!

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!