Building your musical creativity
When students ask me about learning to write music, I tend to start with the same advice, so I thought I'd collect that advice into a short video in case it helps you along your songwriting journey!
A fun way to test your chord precision
By now, you should probably know that I’m a giant kid at heart, and I love to have fun when I’m practicing piano. Today I’ll show you a way that I found to play around with the sounds on my digital piano that actually helps me to improve my playing!
Study your music before sight-reading
It’s really common for my piano students to just start reading a piece of music from the beginning, with no preparation or planning. But just launching into sight reading with no preparation is an easy way to get lost and frustrated. You can set yourself up for breezier success if you find some relationships between your notes before you start to play.
Where can you build some relief into your practice?
When we're constantly challenging ourselves and trying new things at our pianos, it can be easy to start thinking that our piano journey is nothing but one big struggle. But I want to encourage you to purposefully build times of rest or relief into your piano practice.
Practice the skill of piano performance sooner rather than later
I've noticed a misconception that learning your piano pieces better is the key to becoming comfortable with performance. While it's certainly important to know your pieces well, performance is actually an entirely different skill that needs to be developed separately.
A game plan to begin writing music
If you’ve been playing piano for a while and would like to branch out into writing music, here are a few tips I've learned over the years to help you enjoy the process and bring your best ideas forward.
A game plan to play a song by ear
If you’re learning piano so that you can figure out how to play a song by ear, you might benefit from a little road map to help you get there.
Here’s the road map I use to figure out songs as quickly and easily as possible. I hope it’s helpful to you, too!
Let’s make piano plans for 2024!
The New Year is a great time to set new goals for ourselves, and I thought today it could be good for us to come together to share our goals and support each other in achieving them. As a piano teacher, I notice how often success in achieving goals is linked to the quality of the goal itself, so today I’d like to share three pieces of advice to help you create the most sustainable and motivating goals possible!
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” rhythm pattern
Today I’d like to share some sheet music I made to help you learn to play “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles using my favourite rhythm pattern for beginners.
If you’re new here, my rhythm pattern is an easy way for people to start playing piano by ear, rather than needing to learn how to read sheet music right away.