Perfect fifths are one of the most commonly used sounds in all of music history, yet we never seem to talk about them outside of music theory. I'd like to help with that, because knowing about perfect fifths can boost your piano power in a serious way! ✨🎹✨

I often get asked how long a person should practice, but the honest truth is that I don't like giving time-based recommendations.

What's more important to me is the quality of a person's practice, and that's impossible to gauge from a time-based threshold.

Whenever I teach sight reading, I always encourage my students to analyze their music before they start to play. But that’s hard for them to do without knowing a little bit about the key they’re working in.
This usually requires us to pull out the music theory books.

But teaching music theory out of a book is very frustrating for me as a teacher for two reasons.

When you're experimenting with piano rhythm patterns, at some point you're going to encounter chords that have black keys in them.

It's really common for piano beginners to avoid chords that have black keys — but is that really necessary?

Once you've gotten comfortable playing my favourite rhythm pattern for piano beginners, you may be interested in taking your playing to the next level.

In today's video, I show you how you can start to experiment with chord inversions to make your rhythm pattern even nicer to play!

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!

Improving your piano skills doesn't have to be tedious! This is a message I want to shout from the rooftops. There are actually lots of fun ways to improve your practice, if you're willing to think outside the box.

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.

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.