Having a Practicing Routine, Is Essential in Making Sure That You Practice Regularly

It is well and truly obvious that to learn to play the piano, or any other musical instrument, you need to practice regularly and the more regular it is the better. In fact, I think that it is much more important to practice for a few minutes every single day than an hour once a … Read more

Muscle Memory is Useful for Playing the Piano

Recently I have seen online various adverts that talk about secret knowledge of being able to successfully remember how to play pieces of music that you have already learned months or even years ago. It is no big secret, it is just using what is called muscle memory. (As an aside, it is purely a … Read more

Focus on the Daily Goal, not the Long Term Goal

I’ve been thinking lately about why kids seem to be content when they are learning something new, like learning the piano, unlike adults, who seem to spend so much energy wondering whether they are going to be any good. If you think of a five or six year old, they don’t worry whether they will … Read more

Keeping a Beat is Important

Keeping a beat is important, but so is playing the right notes and adding adequate expression. But keeping the beat is possibly the most important aspect, for a number of reasons. The first reason why keeping the beat is important, is that it maintains the flow and integrity of the piece of music. This is … Read more

Some Thoughts on Practical Fingering

This can be a bit tricky to work out whether you should follow the fingering or not on any given piece of music. On top of this, everyone also seems to have an opinion on what is best practice, so here is what I think should be the case. First of all, if you have … Read more

Don’t Quit When Learning Gets Hard

In some ways it is the easiest thing in the world to quit when things get tough and it is no different when you are learning to play the piano. It is easy to forget that hard does not mean impossible, hard just means that it is challenging. I know I am preaching to the … Read more

Pianote Review – Are They Any Good?

There are all sorts of people and platforms on the internet that you can learn to play the piano. Pianote is one of these, which I will discuss my opinions here. Before I do this though, I need to declare that I am not getting any payment for these opinions in any way at all … Read more