New Music!

I know from my own experience, it is always more fun to play a song you've heard before. And its even better when it's a piece that you like, one that gets stuck in your head and has you humming it throughout the day.

Popular music is catchy, fun, and usually upbeat. Best of all, its usually pretty simple when you break it down musically.
This means its GREAT to use as a teaching tool alongside the traditional pedagogy. The only problem I've encountered is getting my hands on sheet music that isn't 10 pages long (apparently the musicians who transcribe pop music professionally haven't figured out how to use the repeat sign effectively yet), or isn't too difficult to use in a lesson with an early intermediate pianist.

So, in the absence of finding any practical piano sheet music, I have started to arrange pieces by request for my students. This is a lot of fun for me, it challenges me and introduces me to music that I don't normally listen to. It also gets my students excited about their practicing, and encourages them to keep advancing.

This also means I have begun to generate a collection of popular sheet music for early and intermediate piano, and I am making them available to you to download here. I will continue to upload more pieces as I transcribe them.

And for those of you who are my students out there, don't be afraid to ask for your favorite pieces. Music is just so much fun!