"I really like your style. I am on my third year of concerted effort learning piano... I found that I could learn a song from sheet music, but I would forget how to play it after a short time. I have adopted your strategy of learning chords, inversions and scales. I appreciate your effort providing free lessons on YouTube! Thanks."

• Jimmac9327

"As I 'sight read' I realized I needed to anticipate notes to play faster. Saw you mention progressions, scales, inversions and here I am. My eyes are opened, thank you man."

"Thanks for these theory explanations and bought the eBook this past month and now am familiar with a lot of the Chords, associating each measure with a Chord and reading thrice as fast than when I was hard translating every single note..."

• Tea Peet

"I used to go to music school, but I haven't seen the pieces the way you've described."

• Darthblanket2121

"Thanks for made it clear. It's hard to understand it as self taught with no mentor."

• Flireflyyss

"I absolutely get your point of view... if you want to become an awesome pianist, regardless of ability (including whether you can read sheet music or not), you can absolutely get 95% of the way there by learning just three types of scales (including their chords and inversions).

After years and years of trying to be a sight reader, I am now so much more satisfied with how I can play and improv. I think a lot of people know the first group, the major chords, inside out. Most decent learners will know their harmonic minors pretty well, but what I found is that it's that last group of scales and chords - melodic minors that really become the special "glue" to your improvisation and playing if you learn and know them inside out and become able to apply their theory to your playing on the fly."

• Tim36332

"I love playing my own arrangements of pieces and improvising, but I also think (as a classical pianist) it's so important to practice the strict technique of classical pieces, specifically the harder etude-like pieces. I'm currently working on some Alkan and I could never have gotten here without that discipline. Still, helping beginners see the connections between harmony like you're talking about with building new chords is vital for their growth. Nice :)"

• Greekarchaeology

Most people who have taken piano lessons, or tried to learn on their own, end up in a similar place. They learn how to read notes, practice pieces, and get better at playing what’s written on the page. For a while, this feels like real progress.

But at some point, something starts to feel unclear. They can play, but they don’t really understand what they’re playing. If they stop practicing a piece, it fades. If they try to go beyond what they’ve learned, there isn’t a clear path forward. Sitting down at the piano without music often feels uncertain, because everything depends on memory.

Over time, the instrument can start to feel just out of reach. It becomes something you can access through specific pieces, rather than something you can actually navigate with confidence.

This isn’t a lack of effort, and it isn’t a lack of ability. Most people have done exactly what they were taught to do. The problem is that they were never shown how the music actually works.

This guide is built to provide that missing framework. It focuses on the structure underneath the music, showing how scales define the musical environment, how chords grow out of those scales, how inversions allow those structures to move, and how functional harmony connects everything together.

When these ideas begin to make sense, the experience of playing changes. Music no longer feels like something that has to be memorized piece by piece, but instead becomes something that can be understood and applied across the keyboard.

If you’ve ever felt like you can play, but don’t fully understand what you’re doing, this is where that begins to change.