The Piano Theory Course

Twenty five video lessons that explain what is actually happening under your hands. Not a blackboard course. Every idea is shown at the keyboard, and most units end with a real song.

Why theory, when you can already play something

Most people who learn piano from videos end up with a pile of songs and no thread between them. You can play five pieces, and the sixth still has to be learned from scratch, note by note, because nothing you learned in the first five transfers.

Theory is that thread. It is the difference between memorising a chord shape and knowing why the chord is built that way, which means you can build the next one yourself. It is what lets you look at a chord chart you have never seen and know roughly where it is going before you play a bar of it.

This course was built for the player who can already find their way around the keys and wants to stop guessing.

What is inside

Twelve units, twenty five lessons, and a full demonstration lesson so you can see how it is taught before you decide.

• Units 1 to 3 · the ground · keyboard orientation, musical intervals, triad chords, chord inversions, major scales and scale degrees. By the end of these you stop counting from middle C and start seeing the keyboard in shapes.
• Units 4 to 6 · how music moves · chord progressions, minor scales, and the circle of fifths. Why one chord follows another, and how the twelve keys relate.
• Unit 7 · seventh chords · four lessons. Sevenths, their inversions, their progressions, and the major seventh. This is where the sound starts to grow up.
• Units 8 and 9 · substitutions and the diatonic circle · replacing one chord with another that does the same job, in major and in minor, and the chord family that belongs to every key.
• Unit 10 · secondary dominants · borrowing pull from outside the key, followed by a full tutorial on Guess Why They Call It The Blues.
• Unit 11 · sus and moldur chords · the chords that refuse to be major or minor, followed by a full tutorial on I Just Called To Say I Love You.
• Unit 12 · extensions · ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, and a final lesson that plays the most common progression in music using everything the course has taught.

How it is taught

Every lesson is filmed at the piano, with the keyboard in view. A new idea is explained, shown, and then played, and the units that introduce the bigger ideas close with a complete song tutorial so the theory lands somewhere real instead of staying abstract.

The lessons are yours to watch in your own time, in order or out of it, as many times as you want. There is no schedule, no login to remember and no subscription.

Who this is for

For a player who can get through a song and wants to understand it. For someone who has followed the free tutorials on this site and keeps hitting the same wall. For anyone who plays by chord charts and wants to know why the chords are the chords. You do not need to read music to take this course.

Before you decide

There are two hundred free video tutorials on this site, and they are staying free. Start with the tutorial library if you have not yet. This course is the other half: the part that explains why the tutorials work.