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Piano Pieces for Small Hands: What to Play and What to Avoid
I have small hands. I mention this occasionally in other posts because it genuinely affects what I can and can’t play — or more accurately, what I can play as written versus what…
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Returning to Piano After a Long Break: What to Expect
The first time I sat down at the piano after years away, I was expecting one of two things: either my hands would remember more than I thought, or nothing would come back…
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Grade 8 Piano Repertoire: What to Aim For
Grade 8 is the goalpost most piano learners have in their heads. It’s the one that gets mentioned when people ask how far you’ve got, the one that marks the line between “learning…
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The Best Piano Pieces from Film: What They’re Like to Play
There’s a specific kind of magic to sitting down at the piano and playing something you recognise from a film. It bypasses all the usual questions about whether you’re playing it well enough…
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Liszt for Adult Piano Learners: Where to Start
Liszt has a reputation problem. When most people think of him, they picture something terrifying: flying octaves, cascading runs, an entire keyboard being thrown at you at once. That reputation is not entirely…
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How to Improve Your Sight Reading as an Adult Piano Learner
I was terrible at sight reading when I started again as an adult. Not “needs work” terrible — genuinely, embarrassingly bad. I’d sit down with a piece I’d never seen, go through the…
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What Piano Grade Am I? A Practical Guide for Adult Learners
When I first started playing piano seriously as an adult, I had no idea what grade I was. I’d done a Grade 1 exam as a child, forgotten approximately everything, and started again…
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Mozart for Adult Piano Learners: Where to Start
I finished learning the Mozart Allegro from K. 282 a while back and I remember the specific feeling of getting to the end of a clean run-through and thinking: right, I want to…
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Debussy for Adult Piano Learners: Where to Start
The first time I played Clair de Lune, it was a simplified version. One of those arrangements that keeps the melody intact and strips out most of the complexity, so you get the…
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Schumann for Adult Piano Learners: Where to Start
Träumerei was the piece that got me into Schumann properly. I’d heard it loads of times before I ever tried to play it — it’s one of those pieces that turns up everywhere,…
