Piano Pilot

Learning strategies are important for piano students. Having developed great learning strategies over years of teaching experience is what makes good teachers. Young piano students, however, need a bit of guidance to practice their music at home using effective strategies to develop good playing habits. Without this they may not acquire the basic knowledge and skills necessary to move forward. Plus, there is no point in having your child spend 30 minutes practicing incorrectly without learning their pieces when the material can be mastered in 10 minutes with good practice habits.

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As someone who has lived through 3 incredibly painful bouts of tendinitis, both in my left arm and right arm, I thought it important to pass on some information that has helped me deal with this in the past.

It is important to understand that playing the piano can cause serious injuries such as tendinitis and carpel tunnel syndrome. Both these ailments are known as repetitive strain injuries. The constant up and down, side to side movement of the arms and fingers when playing piano for long periods of time is what causes these injuries.

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Have you ever wanted to create your own unique piano songs? Just simple pieces that express how you feel? You can if you learn how to improvise first and then learn how to compose. Here’s why.

Improvising allows you to express what you feel without constraint. In essence, it’s like freewriting because the goal here is to free your own unique voice without having to worry about right or wrong, good or bad. It is a skill that students should learn before any other and is foundational for further success at composing. Once you are able to sit down at the piano and can trust your intuition to guide you, you’re ready to compose.

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One of the fundamentals of guitar, besides actually learning how to play, is learning how to tune the guitar. It is an inevitably challenging task at first, but like changing the strings on a guitar, it is something that becomes easier over time and is important if your guitar isn t tuned right, you won t sound good no matter how well you play.

Fortunately for beginners, the current electronic tuners make tuning a breeze. It is still worth learning, however, to tune a guitar the good old fashioned way using a piano or other reference. In this lesson, we ll go over both methods of tuning.

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II-V-I progressions are common in most types of popular music and mainstream jazz and more. If you can play II-V-I progressions you are in a lucky position. What then is a II-V-I progression? Well, come and see!

A C-major scale consists of seven notes: C D E F G A B

A C-major chord consists of the first, third and fifth notes in the C-major scale. This is called a triad.

A chord built from the first step of the scale can also be called I from the roman number one.

If I start on the second note of the C-major scale and construct a triad chord consisting of D F A, I have a chord built upon the second step of the

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