Learning to play the piano by ear is what many would consider to be the skill that they would most like to acquire in all of music learning. To be able to listen to any song and immediately be able to play a piano cover of that song can appear like an impressive feat. However, this is much more attainable than you might think. It’s really an exercise in music theory and pattern recognition.

When watching someone work something out by ear what you may not realise is that they are working through a process of deduction! Rather than working out what notes a song is using, they are actually working out which notes the song is NOT using.

Learning an instrument is a difficult skill to acquire! It takes a lot of time, repetitive practice and commitment for it to become second nature. So it stands to reason that when we spend all of our time learning to read notes and trying to get our fingers to do the right thing that HOW you play the notes gets relegated to the bottom of the priority list!

When I was aged 16, I too spent a large amount of time just trying to get notes learnt and trying not to make mistakes, particularly as I was keen to play lots of flashy piano pieces. It was only much later in my playing career that I realised that this doesn’t actually need to be the case and we don’t necessarily need to sacrifice how we play a piece and the affect it can have in order to learn the notes!

Many years ago, as I headed off to study the piano at music college, I was excited and incredibly determined to be the best pianist that the college has ever seen (very dramatic - I know)…I arrived and found myself surrounded by pianists from around the world whom had studied under some of the best and most esteemed piano teachers around. Even though I had also put in a lot of practice up until this point, it immediately hit me that I was now just a small fish in a big pond!

So in my first year of study I set a goal, and that goal was to practice 8 hours a day, everyday. I would set my alarm for 5:30am each morning and head to the practice rooms that would open at 6:00am. This way I was able to practice for 4 hours before any of the other pianists had managed to finish their breakfast. I was then able to go to lectures, attend ensemble practice and then practice for 2 hour in the afternoon followed by another 2 hour session in the evening!

After many months of practicing like this, I slowly began to realis

Voice leading is simply the act of trying to move between chords with as little movement as possible.

Imagine a choir...in a typical choir there are usually four voice groups; soprano, alto, tenor and bass. The sopranos are the really high women, the altos are the lower women, the tenors are the higher men and the basses are the lowest men. Each of these voices are responsible for singing different melodies, and together these melodies form chords!

But it would be very odd if each of those melodies were jumping up and down to get to the notes that work in each chord, singing a high note for one chord and then jumping down to a low note for the next chord and then back up high for the following chord. Not only would that make it difficult for a singer to sing, but it would also sound quite unnatural to listen to, because its hard for a listener to latch onto lots of jumping around! This is why we have “Voice Leading”.

For a lot of people, starting the year means setting another New Years Resolution and one of the most popular New Years Resolutions is to start or pick back up that dusty musical instrument that’s been sitting in the corner of the room.

Giving yourself a new goal for the year and a start date (1st January) sounds like a great way of kicking yourself into action. However, 9% of people quit after just the first week of setting a New Years Resolution, 43% quit by the end of January and a massive 90% of people don’t make it to the end of the year!

So why is it that so many people quit on there New Years Resolutions and how can you stop becoming another statistic this year?!