Do you stress out when you think about preparing for a musical performance? If so, chances are that you’re worrying about being good enough to play for other people.

There’s a way around performance anxiety that works especially well for sensitive, heart-led people. Building a healthy music performance mindset can start with the small step of considering your own general intention when you practice. When you’re preparing for your performance, do you focus on showing off (for your audience) or showing up (for your music)?

People would be surprised how much time I spend as a piano teacher helping people drop back down into their bodies.

By this I mean putting a pause on their rational brains and help them seek out the emotions that their bodies are trying to surface during the learning experience.

I got a comment on my last video on naming landmark notes where a person shared the way that they learned notes in the treble and bass clefs, using the popular sayings like “All Cows Eat Grass”, “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge”, and so on. This made me realize that perhaps some of you wonder, do I use those sayings at all?

The answer is basically no! I don’t really like using those sayings in teaching people how to read music and I find I don’t even really need to! Here’s why.

Today’s post is for anyone who signed up for piano lessons or a keyboarding in college at the beginning of September and are now finding themselves at the end of September wondering what on earth they signed up for!

We’ve talked about landmark notes a bunch on this site lately because they’re my favourite way to teach my students how to feel comfortable around the musical staff. First I showed you how to find middle C. Then I showed you two really valuable landmark notes on each staff — treble G and bass F.

Today I’d like to show you two more landmark notes that will expand your ability to read music near the middle of the treble and bass staff - high C and low C!

Are you having a hard time remembering your piano pieces? If so, here’s a tip I use to help my students accelerate their memorization skills.

Commit to using the same fingering every time you play the song.

Here’s why that works.

I studied Philosophy in university, and I love to dig into the deeper meanings and hidden assumptions in things we tend to take for granted. As September rolled around and I started to ramp up my marketing for the new school year, I started to notice that I’d taken for granted some approaches to piano lesson marketing that didn’t actually align with my personal values as a heart-centred piano teacher.

The last time I talked about the musical staff, I showed you how we can use the pattern of line-space-line-space to start from middle C and count our way up to find the lowest note on the treble clef and the highest note on the bass clef. Today I’d like to show you two more notes on each staff and explain why these new notes are so valuable to beginner piano players.

In my previous post, I encouraged beginner piano players to choose the kind of music they wanted to play before signing up for piano lessons. It seems to have struck a chord (no pun intended!) for some viewers, because I received some comments back about it. Here’s a response from a viewer that really drives home the importance of being purposeful in your music lessons.