Learn to play beautifully
... even if you're a complete beginner
Conservatory-quality online piano lessons from the City of Music, Vienna, Austria
With up to seven sharps or seven flats in a key signature, it can seem daunting to try to remember the order—yet there’s a simple shortcut that makes it easy.
You just need to remember three simple things: 1. Sharps raise notes, while flats lower notes. 2. The first sharp and first...
Why does a piano keyboard look the way it does? The answer has to do with music modes. The modes are types of scales. A scale is simply a specified sequence of intervals from one note to the same note an octave higher, say, from A to the next higher A.
In order to understand this point it is...
This is a lecture by the eminent pianist Carlo Grante, which he gave as part of a lecture series "Music Explains Itself" for the Accademia Merano in Italy. Carlo is one of my musical mentors, and he kindly asked if he could use a clip from my TEDxSalzburg talk on this subject, "What Makes Music...
An acoustic phenomenon that helps make a piano sound beautiful is sympathetic resonance. If we play a note on the piano, other, compatible notes vibrate in sympathy as long as there are no dampers to, well, put a damper on them. This video lesson demonstrates this phenomenon and two ways you can...
What exactly is "perfect pitch"? This lesson explains what it is, the difference between perfect pitch and relative pitch, and what you should pursue if you weren't blessed—or cursed!—with it.
You may have heard pianists talk about “voicing.” If you’ve been confused it’s certainly understandable, since the term actually has several entirely different meanings in piano playing. This lesson will clarify the different meanings of "voicing” as it relates to...
Everyone should protect their hearing, especially musicians. In this video, pianist Albert Frantz shares tips designed especially for musicians, including hearing protection while traveling and optimizing the acoustics of your practice room.
For the past several years I’ve used a standard-sized iPad. I’ve had several models over the years, all with a 9.7" (diagonal) screen. For me it’s been a general-purpose device, something easy to toss in a briefcase and use for reading and writing email, drafting blog posts, as...
Why do we play music? Music stirs the emotions. It’s beautiful. We love music. We have favorite pieces of music we never tire of. These are all wonderful reasons to play music.
Constructive reasons
Love for a musical instrument, its sound, its expressive possibilities is a similarly...
What do Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Bernstein have in common? All were not only composers, they were also pianists and conductors. In our time many famous conductors started their careers as pianists, including André Previn, Daniel Barenboim and Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Why should pianists...
The simplest way to think of a seventh chord is three thirds stacked on top of each other.
The dominant seventh is the most important of the seventh chords and is fundamental to Western harmony. A useful shortcut is to think of a dominant seventh chord as a major triad with a minor third on top....
Do you love music? Are you learning to play a musical instrument?
There are more benefits to learning a musical instrument than you might have imagined. My colleague Diego Cardini of The Musician Lab prepared a special infographic on the benefits of learning music which you can download here on...
