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Why You Struggle to Play Piano Without Sheet Music or Muscle Memory

13:18

Gymnopedie - Exploring the Roots of Harmony

12:53

Someone Like You (Adele) - Diving Deep Into Chord Progressions!

09:03

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I'm a pianist with 14 years of experience and a dedicated teacher of 5 years. I began studying piano at the age of 10, and my passion for music grew into a successful piano studio in Charlotte, VT. Over the years, I've been involved in a variety of projects, including full length musicals, church services, vocal accompaniment, recitals, studio creation, and more. I offer a holistic approach to the piano, including reading, writing, learning by ear, fundamental music theory, and playing with others. I'm currently dedicated to making piano education accessible to all through online resources and private lessons.

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Shenandoah
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Maggie West's Waltz
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Auld Lang Syne
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Rose in the Heather
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Road to Errogie
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Amazing Grace
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Home on the Range
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Precious Lord, Take My Hand
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Learn Everything About Your Scales

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The Scales

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When I was initially writing the ideas for this video, I came up with a list of problems that was nearly two pages long.

These, along with related problems that we face at the piano, all stem from the same place: a lack of understanding about the foundational structures that build music.

Learning more music won’t help. Buying a new volume or even another set of method books won’t help either. Our search for ideas and new solutions are stemming from one single place.

We have to dive deep into the specific concepts that build music.

Let’s explore Gymnopedie by Erik Satie. When I first learned this piece, I used to think of the right hand and left hand as separate units. I used to think that the right hand was alternating between a B minor and an inversion of F sharp minor.

But when we take a closer look, the left hand is also contributing to the court with G and D. These completely change my original understanding of the harmony because these two notes turn each cord into major seven chords!

When we’re aware of the full harmonic structures that build our music, we’re no longer thinking about individual notes and trying to string all of them together. Instead, we can finally learn what builds the music and have really deep understanding of what we’re playing.

Watch this and witness me play one single chord progression in a few different ways using inversions.

Inversions allow us to move chords around the keyboard and play them in any position which completely frees up our hands and lets us use smoother voice leading.

Here in this video, I take a B dominant seven cord, an E dominant seven cord, then resolve it to an A minor triad. There are so many ways to do this!

Check out @piano.with.patcha if you want to see more piano content like this

How often do you use the G# scale? Let’s go ahead and dive into it as we formed the G# diminished seven cord!

You’ll find more of this over at @piano.with.patcha

You should be practicing your inversions. Inversions allow us so much freedom at the piano because they literally free up our hands to play the same harmonies in any position on the keyboard. And this can help us identify what we’re playing within a piece of music and makes sense of all of these notes.

Learn all your piano fundamentals over at @piano.with.patcha

Diminish seven chords are confusing, especially when we’re trying to make sense of them harmonically within a piece of music. Here are a couple ways to identify them and label them as you’re playing!

Learn more over at @piano.with.patcha

This is how to form E dominant seven!

@piano.with.patcha

This is how we form dominant seven chords!

Check out @piano.with.patcha for more

Learning chord progressions? This is why it’s so essential to learn all of your scales. When we are looking at chord progressions, we start to notice that some chords are major while some chords are minor and that is not random. It’s based off of the triads that can be formed within the scale of the piece.

Each of these triads has particular distances between all of their component notes. And that is based off of the natural occurring distances that are formed by scales!

Check out @piano.with.patcha if you want to dive deeper into chord progressions and scales

There’s two ways to look at this. We can treat the E dominant seven chord as a secondary dominant and leave it at that. But we can also take a look at some of the other minor scales that exist and use those to help make sense of some of the chords and harmonies that we see within a piece of music.

When we form A natural minor, there’s no flats or sharps. So why is it so common to see a G# and pieces of music that use A minor? Maybe this will give you some indication as to why that might be.

Learn everything about your scales over at @piano.with.patcha

Let me show you exactly how all of this musical language applies to a piece of music. This is “Someone Like You” by Adele and it’s a simple four-chord chord progression in the key of a major.

This is a much more effective way to discuss and describe music than having to write everything down or relying on videos in order to guide us forward.

If you want to get yourself familiar with all this language and learn piano fundamentals that are constant across all songs and all genres, check out @piano.with.patcha where I teach all of this information!

Here’s a quick example of what we should all be practicing. I am forming all of the triads that occur within the a major scale and learning how to invert them up and down the keyboard so that when I approach any piece in the key of A major, I’m already a few steps ahead and ready to play any harmony that comes my way.

This helps with everything. Sight reading, learning by ear, and improvising. Learn how to do all of this over at @piano.with.patcha

I always recommend forming every single triad in the key of whatever piece of music that you’re currently playing. In this case, I’m using a major scale to form two different chords. The first chord is a major. Which is based off of the first scale degree, A. The second scale degree will have a different quality to it, which is minor. This is caused by the naturally occurring intervals within the a major scale.

The cool thing is that this is constant across all major scales. If you play a tryout, using the second scale degree, it will always be minor!

Check out @piano.with.patcha and get familiar with all of your piano fundamentals

Wow, what I’m playing might appear to be technically difficult, it’s actually really harmonically simple. That’s because it’s the same three notes repeating themselves over and over again. Those are the three notes of the major triad.

Learning to play your chords and invert them in different positions literally frees up your hands to play everywhere on the keyboard. This is the key step to unlocking your own potential when it comes to arranging your own music.

I go way more in depth with inversions here at @piano.with.patcha

There are so many ways to form dominant seven chords and here I’m just offering another way to look at the chord. I think it’s helpful to build chords from the ground up and I often encourage everyone learning seven chords to first start with their triads and build off of them by adding that new interval that turns it into a seven cord.

Check out @piano.with.patcha to learn all about your seven chords and more!

Inversions are simple in theory, but easily one of the most difficult piano fundamentals to master. All it takes is rearranging the notes of a chord which allows us to play chords in different positions across the keyboard.

I challenge you to find me any piece of music, apart from piano arrangements that are designed for method books and omit inversions on purpose, and comment that here.

Learning them is absolutely essential to freeing up your playing and improving as a pianist. Check out @piano.with.patcha to learn everything about your inversions.

Without exception, this is the formula to form all major scales on the piano. The formula is actually pretty straightforward and easy, and it helps us find the notes, but playing the scale is the challenge. Not to mention putting both hands together at the same time.

Do not skip your major scales! Learn your scales and a ton of other piano fundamentals here at @piano.with.patcha

Most pop songs follow chord progressions and “Someone Like You” is a perfect example of this. If we dive into the key of a major and pick out a few of the triads that we can form using the scale, we’re already halfway towards playing the song.

Using a couple of inversions and a distinct right hand pattern, this is such an accessible piece that I recommend everyone at least try so they can hear themselves play something recognizable and a little bit technically challenging.

I made a 10 minute in-depth version of this video and you can check it out over at @piano.with.patcha

A natural minor is a relative minor of C major, which means it has the same flats and sharps as this major scale. The natural minor scale is located directly a minor third below its relative major. Having knowledge of both of these scales will help you us keep track of all of the flats and sharps as we’re wearing our scales.

Learn all of your scales and how they work together over at @piano.with.patcha

By learning all of my cord versions, I can play any cord in any position on the keyboard and add technical variations. Even though this sounds technically difficult and packed with notes, it’s actually super harmonically simple! It’s just the notes of the a minor triad, A, C, and E repeating themselves over and over again!

Composers and songwriters across all genres and all time periods used these exact concepts to write their music. Get familiar with these over at @piano.with.patcha

Every single foundational scale has seven chords hidden within it. Learning these seven chords is probably one of the most beneficial things that can expand your understanding of harmony. This translates to every aspect of playing piano. From reading sheet music to improvising to adding our own personal touch to a piece, knowing the harmonic structures that exist within the key of the piece of music that we’re playing is so helpful.

Check out @piano.with.patcha and learn how to do this with every single scale!

this is how you take any simple triad and turn it into a beautiful arpeggio. There are so many moments in music that may seem technically complicated and unable to manage as a beginner pianist, but when we actually dive into what the music is made of, we find out that harmony isn’t that difficult. It’s just the same three notes repeating themselves over and over again!

This is how to play an a minor triad and break it up into a beautiful arpeggio.

If you want to learn how to do this with any cord in any song, check out @piano.with.patcha

When we listen to music, we may be overwhelmed by how technically difficulty music sounds. But when we reduce all of these notes down to its most basic form and analyze the harmony, we will actually find out that we’re just playing the same three notes over and over again.

In this example, I wanna show you exactly how Philip glass wrote Metamorphosis and how we can take these patterns to improvise and have fun on our own.

I have a full 10 minute version of this video @piano.with.patcha

Vanessa Carlton! Not Carly Rae Jepsen whoops

I found this pattern over and over again with my students. Many of them come to me, struggling to reach sheet music while simultaneously able to play some fun popular pieces that are technically difficult. They get hung up on the sheet music and actually believe that’s the limit of what they’re able to play!

Depending on sheet music and depending on muscle memory or both crutches. The key to getting out of this trap is developing an understanding of the fundamental concepts that build the music itself.

Learn more about how to get out of this situation at @piano.with.patcha

Music isn’t actually that complicated once you dive deep into the core fundamental concepts that build it. In this example, I’m showing you you exactly how to play in the style of Philip Glass by building Metamorphosis II from the ground up.

If we start with a scale, form all of the chords within that scale, then learn to invert the chords and play them in different positions, we can easily break out of sheet music AND make sense of improvisation, and any music learned with muscle memory.

Check out @piano.with.patcha to go way deeper into all these concepts.

Even if you don’t play an instrument, you probably have really good aural memory! If you can hear a piece of music in your head and have those same notes, come out of your mouth when you sing a song, you are using your aural memory!

Translating this to the keyboard can be a little bit more difficult. When we have the whole 88 keys of the keyboard to contend with, all of these notes can become confusing when we’re trying to pinpoint one single note in our own brains. Playing a ton of notes will cause us to lose that one note that we're trying to figure out!

Check out a full 10 minute version of this video here at @piano.with.patcha

I’m learning a piece of music by ear and I’m trying to figure out what a certain cord is using the melody and the bass. These two pieces of information can give us an indication as to what the cord will be that will allow us to harmonize.

In this case, the combination of C & G tells us that we’re going to be forming a C major triad!

Check out @piano.with.patcha to dive way deeper into all these concepts

This is why getting familiar with your scales is so important. We can use these scales to form all of the harmony that we will utilize when we try to learn a piece of music by ear.

In the key of C major, we can form seven different chords, using the component notes of the C major scale!

It’s also essential that we weren’t to play all these chords in different positions. These are known as inversions.

Check out @piano.with.patcha if you want to get familiar with all of your piano fundamentals

How can we figure out which cord to use when we’re learning a piece of music by ear? We can usually make indications as to what the harmony will be using the melody and bass, but what if it it’s all one note?

Having some knowledge of common chords and chord progressions can help in this process. In this case, I’m moving to a set of Fs that can be a part of a few different chords, but F major becomes the most likely answer to what I’m looking for because a IV cord is very common in pop.

Check out @piano.with.patcha and get yourself familiar with piano fundamentals like this

When I first started diving into the skills in order to learn a song by ear, it took me months to cover the first steps.

Identifying the scale that a piece of music uses will allow you to move forward and have a much better idea of the notes in the melody and bass which will provide you with a launchpad to start harmonizing.

Check out @piano.with.patcha and get started on this process straight away.

Learning how to play piano by ear is easily one of the most difficult things we can attempt to learn as musicians.

Any progress is progress when your first starting. If it takes a whole entire day to figure out only a few notes, you have spent that whole entire day training your ear to do something that has never been able to do before and that is all that matters.

Check out @piano.with.patcha to get familiar with your core piano fundamentals, and become a more well-rounded musician

Making Puff, the Magic Dragon way more fun

Does this sound like you? This is why you're struggling.

Forming dominant 7 chords! They're everywhere.

INSTANTLY revolutionize your musical career.

Making classical a little bit easier to understand...

Here's a case for taking the time to learn your basics!

Here's a new lens to look at music... hope this can help!

Learning music is most difficult when you're completely dependent on muscle memory... here's how to break out of that.

Turning Fur Elise into a Chopin Nocturne, a Joplin Rag, and More!

Introduce chords to your musical vocabulary

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start here

Get Started with the Free Ebook

Lessons in Fundamentals

Lessons

Why You Struggle to Play Piano Without Sheet Music or Muscle Memory

Gymnopedie - Exploring the Roots of Harmony

Someone Like You (Adele) - Diving Deep Into Chord Progressions!

Musicians Say:

Fundamentals Club

access all full length lessons (around 30 min each)

About

Everything in One Place

A Piano Fundamentals Book

376 pages 800+ diagrams

Heading 1

Lectures

here

Shenandoah

Maggie West's Waltz

Auld Lang Syne

Rose in the Heather

Road to Errogie

Amazing Grace

Home on the Range

Precious Lord, Take My Hand

Learn Everything About Your Scales

the most in depth scales course out there

The Scales

The Scales

Work With Patcha One On One

Open slots are available. Claim your spot!

Private Lessons

keep discovering

​

​Follow me on Instagram

376 pages
800+ diagrams

Follow me on Instagram