Welcome to the first week of the course! We're starting completely from scratch, assuming that you've never played piano in your life. Watch through the lesson videos this week, then check out the "practice plan" sheet at the end, which I'll provide for each lesson in order to keep you organized.

For those of you who have played before, the first introductory lessons will cover familiar ground, but I'll be ramping things up very quickly, as we'll be getting through what is often the first 6-12 months of lessons in 20 weeks!

A note on the downloads:

Every week, I'll provide you with a lesson plan to give you an overview of what to expect for the week. You'll find that download at the top (this week it's titled "Week 1 Basics").

Below that, you'll see all of the sheet music downloads. This week, there is a PDF download of the piece with and without a music staff - I encourage you to print off both, as some people prefer one format over the other. I recommend learning with just the letters for the first part of the week, but putting the notated version in front of you toward the end of the week.

There are also .mscz files - these are Musescore downloads. Musescore is a free notation program which you can download here if you'd like. Every piece I assign you will have a printable PDF version, as well as a Musescore version. With the Musescore version, you're able to hit the "play" button on the piece, change the tempo, and so on, which allows you to learn it more easily - previous students have found this program very helpful. Plus, if and when you get into composing your own pieces, this is a great program to use.

Finally, there are sight reading exercises to download. Each week, I'll assign 5 sight reading excerpts for you to play - refer to the lesson plans for more details on how to do this.

If you'd like additional practice structure, you can download the day-by-day checklist I've created for the week.

Each week, I'll include a Zip file for ease of downloading. You can find that below:

Follow along with this piece on the Musescore app. (optional; for those who use tablets or mobile devices to practice.) You can also access the sight reading Musescore files for this week. Here is the music on MuseScore.