September 2026 - Start with Five

September 2026

“I have been looking and looking for someone just like you to assist me in learning piano in an organized way. I have always wanted to learn since I was a young child and now at the age of 68 I have found you.”

I often receive wonderful messages from students and followers, but this one really touched my heart.

It reminded me of so many messages I’ve received since releasing Simple & Beautiful Piano — from students all over the world who have told me some version of the same thing:

I’ve always wanted to learn piano.

Sometimes it’s said hopefully. Sometimes almost as a confession. And sometimes with a little resignation, as though perhaps too much time has already passed.

It also made me think of my mom, who is now in her second year of learning piano on her own through my courses. (She prefers it that way — apparently I’m too tough in person, hah!) And as of today, she is 79 years young.

Messages like these ground me. They remind me why I started doing this in the first place: to make high-quality piano instruction available to people who have “always wanted” to play.

And after two years of creating online courses and YouTube videos, I made a decision at the beginning of this fall:

I want to treat my YouTube channel as a classroom.

Not simply a place to make videos about piano, but a place to actually teach piano — thoughtfully, thoroughly, and in a way that gives you something useful to take back to the instrument.

So this September, I went back to one of the simplest and most important exercises I know:

Five-Finger Scales.

If you learned piano traditionally, you may know them as five-finger patterns. Five notes, five fingers. They don't look terribly exciting.

But simple doesn't mean unimportant.

Five-finger scales give us a small, manageable framework for learning so many of the things that eventually make piano playing feel natural: how the hand moves, how the fingers coordinate, how keys and chords are organized, how patterns repeat across the keyboard, and how technique and music theory connect to the music we actually play.

It looks like a beginner's exercise. But in my experience, most of what a pianist needs starts here. Learn one five-finger scale well, and you've also learned: 

• five of the seven notes of a major scale
• the major chord inside it (notes 1, 3, and 5)
• the starting point for understanding minor, seventh, and suspended chords

That’s why I decided to build a series around them, starting from the fundamentals and gradually showing you how much musicianship can grow from something so simple.

The first two videos are now on my YouTube channel, with more to come this fall.

Part 1: The Gateway Scale

Watch Part 1 →

Part 2: Fingers Don't Listen?: Coordination & Articulation

Watch Part 2 →

Keep learning, keep playing — and if you are one of those people who has always wanted to play the piano, I hope you’ll remember:

It is still worth beginning.