I created this document because I ran into the same problem that countless other pianists run into. Despite having teachers and an endless supply of YouTube videos, I had no idea how to play piano without using sheet music. I struggled to digest and retain music and I had no idea what to do when it came time to play a song for my friends or family when they asked to hear what I was working on. 
 
I set out to solve this problem and the following pages represent the information that I have gathered over these past few years. This is the same document that I use to teach my own students about fundamental piano concepts. 
 
This document dives deep into the core of how music works. Here I explain how to form scales, chords, inversions, and how to bring all of this information together into one coherent system called functional harmony. Functional harmony is one of many lenses that pianists can use to view music and it’s been the most deep and effective for me as I navigate the world of music on my own. 

 
There are a few sections within this book:
 
A Little Bit About the Keyboard provides a brief overview of the things I would teach a new student within our first couple of lessons. 
 
Functional Harmony lays out the foundation of the concept with charts and diagrams for all major keys. 
 
Part I - Scales goes into depth on forming major, natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor, major pentatonic, and blues scales with charts for finger numbers and a diagram to provide a visual for each scale.
 
Part II - Chords goes into depth on forming major, minor, diminished, and augmented triads. This section later builds these triads into major 7, minor 7, dominant 7, diminished 7, half-diminished 7, minor major 7, and augmented major 7 chords. Each chord is displayed in root position along with all of their inversions. 
 
 
Functional harmony, the most complicated and difficult concept to grasp, is the second section of this book rather than the last because it will likely be referenced the most of all of the sections. If you are new to the concepts of scales, chords, and inversions, I recommend completely skipping functional harmony and diving straight into Part I - Scales and Part II - Chords.
 
I created each of the individual 800+ diagrams that make up this document using Google Slides. I then compiled it all together using Google Docs and spent years combing over all of the material checking for mistakes and inconsistencies. This is the best I have to offer! 
 
This book is priced at $30.00 because that was the cost of a 30 minute lessons with me when I first started teaching piano.
 
Pages: 376