Before you start playing any instrument, a little bit of music theory is helpful and necessary. This article will give you a basic understanding of musical notes. To explain musical notes, we’ll take a look at notes on a keyboard because it nicely lays out the notes in two categories—white keys (natural notes) and black keys (sharps and flats)—and, as you move from the left side of the keyboard towards the right side, presents keys from low to high. White Keys vs. Black Keys (Natural Notes vs. Sharp and Flat Notes) As you can see, there are white keys and … Read more

There are piano tuners and then there are piano technicians, also known as piano doctors or piano surgeons. Anyone can tune a piano with today’s technology, and virtually anyone can advertise themselves as a piano tuner. Neither piano tuners nor piano technicians go to four year universities to get their training like most other professions. So, what exactly is the difference between a piano tuner and a piano technician and who do you want working on your piano? A piano has over 3000 parts. Tuning the piano is rather minor when you consider this. A piano tuner does one thing, … Read more

In this article, I focused on grouping together Italian musical terms according to grammatical categories and then showed how we can take ownership of their combinations in a more creative way, rather than just learning them separately by rote. This article explains the same terms from the grades I – V (ABRSM) but in a different way, namely showing how they share roots with English words. This will help you grasp and remember Italian terms much more easily.  In the left column, I listed the Italian terms in alphabetical order, you will notice that some terms have been left out, … Read more