Piano Lessons

This week we come to the end of our Sixty and Me Piano Lessons, as we play the final page of our Upper Hands Piano, BOOK 1. Congratulations on your determination! Learning how to play the piano is difficult, and if you persevered through our lessons…

As we near the end of our Sixty and Me lessons, I want you to think about maintaining a repertoire of songs and pieces to have ready to play for friends and family. (You can pronounce it as “RE-PER-TOIRE” or RE-PE-TWA”.) Trust me, people love to hear their loved ones play music….

I take French lessons remotely with a French teacher. Sometimes when I am practicing my French, I start to hear voices in my mind saying, “I’m never going to get this, why am I even trying?” Perhaps you have had a similar experience while learning your music…

When you have a song or piece that requires some jumping around, for example moving from the D chord to the A chord, or the B chord to E chord in Careless Love on p.91, you can practice by closing your eyes before jumping to the 2nd chord…

Today we revisit the Minuet you played in Lesson 28, but this time we are adding some bass notes to the melody. One of the most difficult things for beginning piano students to learn is that the bar lines between the measures including the repeat bars…

Welcome to lesson 35! Today I discuss simplifying your left-hand chords, and playing with increased expression, in the Barcarole on p.88 of our Upper Hands Piano, BOOK 1. I love the Barcarole on p.88, which is called Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour…

Welcome to Lesson 34! Today I discuss the French chef’s term Mise en Place, and how, like a chef’s kitchen, musicians order their practice space to make it organized, efficient, and appealing. As you will see in my video, I am thrilled to be back in my original teaching space…

One of the biggest obstacles to effective practice is distractions. Sometimes it seems like the minute we sit down to play, our family members suddenly need our attention, desperately. Or we realize that we forgot to send an important…

Welcome to Lesson 32! Today we are going to work on improving our note reading skills and will learn to use chord symbols in order to play from Fake Books! Let’s do it! In your Chord Calisthenics you have been seeing chord symbols above the staff…

We’re going to look at some astonishing scientific evidence showing that complex activities such as taking music lessons “resulted in a 50% reduced risk of developing dementia” and that taking piano lessons, specifically, reduces our risk…