Resources
Things I make for my own students and give away — practice sheets, plans, and the odd arrangement. Take whatever is useful.
For the most efficient
learning and practising
XinRu’s Practising Tower
When I was a piano student myself, this is the question that confused me more than any other:
To what standard is my practice actually good enough?
Practising is not a feeling. The answer cannot be “practise until it feels like it is under your fingers” — that is not an answer, it is a shrug. It should be something you can track, something clear, and something you can apply to everything you practise.
So stop spending your practice time on a feeling. Have a standard instead.
Bench · Cottage · House · Mansion · Castle — the five levels I use with my own students to tell whether a passage is finished, or only familiar. One page, free.
For knowing
how many beats that is
Every rhythm that fits inside a beat — and what each one adds up to
A student who can name a crotchet and name a semiquaver will still stop dead at a dotted quaver followed by a semiquaver. Naming the notes is not the same as counting them.
How many beats is that?
One pizza is one beat. Every card turns over to show that beat cut into slices — one colour per note, the colour changing exactly where the next note begins. The answer stops being a rule to remember and becomes a shape you can see.
And every rhythm gets a word you can say out loud. A crotchet is Steak. Two quavers are Pepper. Four semiquavers are Pepperoni. Eight demisemiquavers are Pepperoni Panettone. Say the word at the right speed and you have played the rhythm.
Then Test me shuffles the pack, puts up a rhythm, and asks the one thing an exam will ask — how many beats? You answer, it tells you straight away, and it keeps the score.
Seventeen cards in three groups — one beat, two beats, longer. Free, nothing to fill in, and it works on your phone.
No email, no account. Turn the cards over, then switch to Test me.
One beat · Two beats · LongerFor the very first
years at the piano
The Colour Keyboard Starter Kit
The first thing a four-year-old has to learn is the keyboard — and they have to learn it before they can read a single note. This is the sheet I use to teach it.
They see red, they press red.
The colour keyboard. Middle C is red. D is orange. E is yellow — then green, blue, pink and purple carry on up the ladder. Their first pieces are not notes on a stave; they are colours on a page.
The animals. Red C is a cat, orange D is a dog, yellow E is an elephant. A name is an abstraction; a cat is a friend — and children remember friends.
The order to take the stickers off. Stickers are a ladder, not a floor. The real work is removing them, one at a time, in an order that does not frighten anybody — they are not being tested, they are being trusted. A four-year-old takes trust seriously.
Every key, its colour and its animal, plus the order to peel the stickers away. One page, free — print it tonight.
For Grade 5
music theory
Everything you have to know by heart
Most of Grade 5 theory can be worked out. Intervals, chords, cadences, scales, time signatures — give a student the method and they can reason their way to the answer every time.
This is the part you cannot reason your way to.
It has to be in your head before you walk in, and ABRSM scatters it across five separate grade books — a little in each, so you meet the same subject five times and never see the whole of it at once.
So here it is, all of it, gathered into one place and put in order — with the tricks I use with my own students when something will not stay put.
Terms · Signs · Ornaments · Instruments · All 24 key signatures in all four clefs · Degree names. Fifteen engraved pages, free.
Flashcards for all the Grade 5 musical terms you have to remember
Chapter One puts every foreign term in one place, in order. Then comes the part no book can do for you — finding out which ones are actually in your head.
Reading the list is not learning the list.
So this one asks. You type the answer and it tells you straight away whether you were right. Every term you get wrong goes back into the pack and comes round again — and again — until you get it right. The ones you know drop out, so what is left on the screen is exactly what you still have to learn.
Italian, German, French, or all three at once. Term → English, English → term, or mixed. There is an only the ones I keep getting wrong mode for the week before the exam, and it picks up where you left off when you come back.
All 152 terms on the Grade 5 syllabus — 140 Italian, 6 German, 6 French. Free, nothing to fill in, and it works on your phone.
No email, no account. It opens and you start.
Italiano · Deutsch · FrançaisMore coming here — practice plans, arrangements, and whatever else turns out to be worth sharing.