Planning tools and thinking frames for the decisions that happen before a lesson starts.
Should I give this piece now?
Three minutes with a new score, four gates: scan the page, inventory the technique with ✓△✗, weigh the student's current state, then turn the choice into a schedule. Whichever gate it fails, the piece goes on the future list instead. Printable worksheet included.
Run the check →How do you want to get to know this piece?
The companion to the four-gate check: once a piece clears, the lesson belongs to the student. Five stages of questions where the teacher never supplies an answer, plus a printable detective sheet the student fills in and takes home. 15–20 minutes inside a normal lesson.
Open the activity →The 7 Habits walk into the piano studio
The same habit looks nothing alike with a preschooler, a schoolchild, a working adult or a learner of seventy. Twenty-eight squares of translation — what to watch for, what I'd try, and a question left for you at the end of each one.
Press the first key →Planning a student recital, backwards from the date
Venue, repertoire, programme, announcements, run sheet — the whole project that gets rebuilt from scratch every term. Enter the recital date and the milestones lay themselves out: ten phases of checkable items, a run-sheet template, and three ways to handle the fee question.
Start counting back →Choosing repertoire isn't a lottery
Level, personality, strengths, practice time, learning cycle, parental support, whether the hand reaches an octave. List the candidates, let the student pick one, enter the recital date — and that student's own start date and milestones fall into place. Fill in online, print in one click.
Fill the first sheet →Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas, paired with Czerny
Each sonata layered by difficulty with the technical direction it trains, paired with the Czerny studies that build towards it. Henle difficulty ratings included, for teachers and students choosing what comes next.
Open the reference →If you're learning on your own, these are the two questions that cause the most trouble: what to play next, and how to survive the stage.
Can I actually play this piece?
What stops self-learners is usually not effort — it's choosing the wrong piece. You don't need to know your "grade": find the one sentence out of six that sounds most like you, and get your comfort-zone list, your worth-a-stretch list, and the pieces most likely to go wrong at that level.
Find your list →Rehearsing everything that could go wrong
Before you can show what you've prepared, there's one more thing to practise: being on stage itself. A rehearsal checklist plus a worst-case simulator, so every "what if" gets walked through at home first. Works for recitals, exams, competitions and recordings.
Start rehearsing →Scenes from Childhood
Thirteen miniatures, thirteen states of mind. So few notes that there is nowhere to hide — a serious test of voicing and control, disguised as a set of little pieces.
Explore the set →What if you were the composer?
Twenty-year-old Bach walked 400 kilometers to hear one organist play, and his four weeks of leave are up. Tchaikovsky's mentor calls his new concerto badly written. Ten composers, three real turning points each: make the call, then see what really happened. After three acts you get an SEL report with your strengths, three things to try at the piano this week, and your next composer.
Step into their life →Written for the person sitting next to the piano bench, not for the person on it.
Which kind of practice parent are you?
Twenty real situations from real practice rooms, six parent types, and the "love language" your child is actually waiting to receive. Takes five to eight minutes, and a few of the questions are worth stopping at.
Take the quiz →Competitions and performances: what to watch for
From deciding to enter to walking back off stage: four approaches that won't win it for you, the dress code, a packing checklist that remembers itself, the run of the day, and ground rules for parents at the side of the hall. Includes a section written for teachers on scheduling a competition piece.
Read the guide →The Composer Gossip Weekly
Fifty true anecdotes from music history — Brahms forgetting his belt, Beethoven counting coffee beans, Dvořák chasing trains. Good for a car ride to a lesson, or for a child who thinks composers were born on the front of a textbook.
Read the stories →Most of this site is in Chinese
There are around fifty more tools, guides and essays on the Chinese side — a teacher community, a podcast, free teaching materials, and a good deal of writing about what many years in a piano studio actually teach you. More pages will appear here as they're translated. Have a look at the Chinese site →