Getting the most from this great hobby!
Classical scores do not normally use chord symbols. If one appears above the stave in an edition of Chopin, it was almost certainly added later by an editor rather than written by Chopin himself. If your musical background is mainly classical, symbols such as Cmaj7, C9 or G7(♭9) can look as though they belong to...
"Do complex chord symbols help classical pianists?"Continue reading
Have you ever wondered why we happily edit photographs—but somehow feel guilty about editing audio? We have long known that photos in newspapers and magazines are almost always ‘air brushed’. As Smartphones got better, we all started to realise that this was something that we could now do ourselves. As a result, the majority of...
"Why We Think Editing Photos Is Normal—But Editing Audio Somehow Feels Like Cheating"Continue reading
This article is part of my step by step guide on how to practice the piano effectively. It looks at how we diagnose problems in piano practice (a skill that changes everything). At some point, most of us reach a stage where practice starts to feel less effective. And yet… things don’t really improve. When...
"How to Diagnose Mistakes"Continue reading
This article is part of my guide to improving our piano playing and practising. How to Structure Our Piano Practice (Once Simple Routines Stop Working) Organising our practice time is incredibly important. Especially as busy adults, there are many calls on our time and we simply can’t afford to waste it. But before we get...
"How to define the right Piano Practice Routine"Continue reading
This article is part of my guide to Improving our Piano Playing One of the reasons we get stuck is that we tend to do too much of one type of practice. Either we simplify endlessly without ever testing ourselves … or we repeatedly try to play things “as written” without actually solving the problem....
"Pareto Piano Practice"Continue reading
This article is part of my guide to recording your piano at home. One of the biggest obstacles to getting great piano recordings is trying to capture both the audio and the video with the same device. Whether you look at a Hollywood film or a simple YouTube podcast, audio and video are almost always...
"How to Record Piano with Separate Audio and Video (It’s Easier Than You Think)"Continue reading
OK, ‘pianists – move that booty’ is, I agree, bit of a click bait title, but I promise I have a serious point behind it. Traditional expectations I’m sure amateur pianists of my generation grew up watching the likes of Arthur Rubinstein, almost statuesque, at the piano. It seemed that he moved very little, if...
"Pianists – move that booty!"Continue reading
I was introduced to a fabulous quote from Louis Kentner when I first read Graham Fitch’s eBook series on Practising the Piano. Kentner purports that: “There is no such thing as difficult music, it is either easy or it is impossible. The process by which it migrates from one to the other is called Practice.”...
"The Three Stages of Learning a Piece on Piano"Continue reading
As a general rule, we tend to learn entire pieces rather than just parts of them. However, I can think of three occasions where it might well be worth learning only a part rather than the entire thing. Increasing Diversity in Practice One idea that I’ve heard before but read most recently in Penelope Roskell’s...
"Should we ever partially learn piano repertoire?"Continue reading
One annoying thing I have noticed is that that pieces I previously thought I had mastered (or as close as I’m likely to get to mastery) seem to subsequently deteriorate over time. Why, once we have overcome the hurdles, isn’t it ‘in the bank’? I think I found the answer to this in William Westney’s...
"The Piano Performance Account – and how to keep it in credit!"Continue reading
