Learning to improvise in music is a very unique skill and much like when we have a conversation (and essentially improvise with words), your hands need to be very comfortable with the patterns that make up the language of music. This is why initially it is best to systematise your improvisation so that you are able to clearly think through the process in your head as you are playing.

So when starting an improvisation you first need to select the scale that you are going to be using, then from here you can either play a melody and pick chords that work with your melody notes, or you can play chords and pick a melody that works with your chords.

Much of music can be understood by the chords and melodies that make up a piece of music. This means that if you are writing your own music, writing an arrangement of a piece of music, improvising or playing from a chord chart, the chords you choose and/or the way that you play those chords can have a massive impact on how the piece of music sounds and feels.

There are many ways that you can play chords, but one of the most frequent requests I get is for some interesting chord patterns to help vary the way that the chords sound. However, its important to understand that you can play any combinations of the notes that make up a chord and each player will prefer different patterns and associate them with different effects.

A question that I get asked frequently (particularly as my content has reached more self-taught learners) is; do you NEED a teacher in order to get good at music?

In isolation, this is a rather more difficult question to answer then it initially might appear because it largely depends on two things; what is meant by “good at music” and what perceived rate of progression do you need in order to stay committed and continue to feel excited about learning the instrument!

Performance anxiety is something that most musicians are very well acquainted with. It can be a feeling of slight nervousness that can heighten awareness and improve a performance, or it can be a feeling of complete dread that is debilitating and prevents you from achieving your full potential. However, performing doesn’t need to be an activity filled with fear and there are many ways to temper and harness performance anxiety so that it becomes a benefit to you, rather than a hindrance.

Since the invention of piano competitions and the marking system used for graded exams, there have been many attempts at quantifying what “success” looks like for learning an instrument. This has some merits, it enables us to see how we are doing and feel a sense of constant progression and this can be motivating.

However, a negative consequence of this is the constant comparison to others that you might end up feeling. Ultimately, music isn’t a quantifiable endeavour and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Music requires a vast array of skills and what is your strength may be someone else’s weakness.

At the start of any musicians journey into music, the first stage in the process of reading is understanding how to read the notes and learning to recognise them quickly.

There are several ways that are often used to do this and some are more affective than others for long term progress. Many musicians use mnemonic to find the notes on the page. For example, for the treble clef (the way we generally read notes for the right hand on the piano) you may have heard the mnemonic “Every Good Boy Deserves Food” (or something similar to this) to remember the notes that make up the lines on the page.

For many, writing original music is an appealing prospect. In some respects it is the epitome of what it means to be a musician and not only is there no correct way of doing it, but it is also an incredibly personal experience. The process of creating your own music is one of exploration, going in search of a particular mood or feeling that you want to create and an attempt at representing yourself or a story using the language of music.

In music the word “interval” is used to simply describe the distance between two notes. We label how notes relate to each other for many reasons, however, the most important reason is that it helps us make sense of how combinations of notes might feel when played together.

There are two steps that we take in order to label note relationships. Firstly, we label a note relationship by the number of notes that separate them alphabetically.

Sight Reading is often thought of as the ultimate skill in piano learning and many students of the instrument believe that if they can just master the ability to pick up a piece of piano music and play it, then they have mastered the instrument. However, although sight reading is an important and impressive skill, to some extent sight reading is better thought of as is a skill of utility rather than one of musicianship.

Let me explain…

It is often said that learning music is like learning a new language and this parallel is a fascinating one. Of course there are some clear differences; music conveys more abstract ideas and the meaning is changed by both the quality of the sound (such as the texture and instrumentation) as well as the note choices themselves. However, from my career in music and my interest in language learning it has become more and more apparent that there are a lot more similarities in the process of learning than there are differences!

Time signatures are a feature of every piece of music that we read and yet they are often neglected and never fully understood. This is because it’s often thought that time signatures only tell us “how many beats there are in a bar of music”. However, this is not what a time signature actually does! Time signatures are actually much more important then you may think and they are a fundamental part of not only reading rhythms but also understanding how to FEEL the music as they have the import function of telling us which notes to stress and how we should feel the pulse of a piece of music.

The Circle of Fifths is essentially a visual representation of some of the most important concepts to understand when learning music and is a great tool to use when trying to understand how notes, chords and scales relate to each other other.

However, the image of a circle of fifths itself is less important than the information that it tells us, and once the information is learnt and understood then the visual image of a circle of fifths serves only as a reminder of these key concepts. This is why it would be very unusual for a musician to pull out a picture of the circle of fifths or even make reference to the circle of fifths when playing, writing or learning a piece of music.

When we think about chords it is easy to think of them as their own entity, thinking… a “C major chord is just a C major chord and this is the notes C, E and G”. However, in music this isn’t entirely how they function. Although we can certainly find chords on a piano independent of any other information, chords are better understand in context and by how the chord relate to each other and to the piece of music you are playing.

This is why it is important to understand the types of chords that exist and the types of chords we expect to see when playing a piece of music.

The harmonic series is a phenomenon that is responsible for most of Western music theory. Not only is it what music is based on, but it can also help us understand why certain notes, chords and sounds are pleasing or not-so-pleasing to listen to!

When we play a note on any instrument we are actually hearing the sound produced from a vibration and the speed of that vibration determines the pitch (or the note) that we hear. For example an “A“ in the middle of a piano is 440 hertz which means it’s vibrating 440 times per second!

Picking up an instrument or trying to take your playing to the next level can be an incredibly fulfilling yet difficult process. As many musicians will attest; learning an instrument teaches you a lot about yourself, your ability to commit to something and it also teaches you how to learn. However, when starting to learn something new, you are at the bottom of a mountain looking up, and it’s inevitable that the thought might creep in “Is there a faster way to get to the top? Surely there’s a shortcut?”.

It’s clear that no-one likes to think that something is going to take them a long time to achieve - especially not years! and I often receive messages, emails and video comments which all share one of two themes; “how can I learn music skipping the parts that I don’t want to do?” or “I am intelligent, why is it taking so long?”.

When we make music there are few things that affect how a piece of music feels as much as the chords that we use. There are many types of chords but they all begin as the humble “triad” which forms the basis of all chords in music. These chords can end up as something much fancier, such as a “Cmaj7b9#11” - but in reality, this is just a C triad with some extra notes!

This means that if we know which triads a piece of music is using, we can pretty much play anything! Every song uses a scales comprised of 7 notes! This means that using a scale we can only make 7 triads (one starting on each note)…which means that most songs only have 7 triads that they are using.

When learning anything self-taught it can be difficult to know what to learn and when to learn it. This is why having a teacher can be such an advantage, because they have been through the process themselves and have likely seen and helped many people acquire the exact skillset that you are hoping for!

However, learning the piano self-taught also has many advantages (e.g. it’s much cheaper) and with a clear roadmap, it’s more than possible to negate some of the downsides and make big strides towards your piano goals!

But, how do you actually get there? How do you know what to learn? How do you know what order to learn it in? How do you know how long it’s going to take and how long it’s supposed to take?

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