The strategy you should know to accelerate your piano skills.

Getting started on your piano journey can be a little overwhelming. There are so many notes and chords to learn, but this one tip will help you make remarkable progress.

It’s something Dan has taught hundreds of piano students (and that we include in our courses!). We have seen it greatly increase students’ ability to learn new music.

Now, this piano tip isn’t about scales, posture, or technique. It doesn’t even primarily involve your hands.

This has everything to do with your eyes!

Practice Seeing the Piano

How we practice seeing the piano can make an enormous difference in your ability to learn and play new music. 

Too often, we rely on muscle memory, which requires repetition after repetition on the piano to learn something new. That traditional route takes so much time and can be so tedious!

But, by practicing how you see the piano instead, you can: 

• greatly improve the speed of learning something new, 
• help it stick in your memory longer, and 
• make learning the piano more approachable. 

So, how do we practice seeing the piano? Let’s try this together!

 The “Play And Look Away” Method

Imagine this: You are learning a song on the piano and there is a chord in it that you haven’t played before. 

The best way you can quickly master this new chord is with what we call the “play and look away method”. Here is how it works: 

✨ Steps 4 and 5 are the secret sauce! ✨ 

Once you have visually memorized the notes, you should be able to comfortably and quickly find them on the keyboard when bringing your hands and eyes back. 

Let's look at a practice example together to see this strategy in action. 

>> If you’re just getting started, check out our resources on learning note names and our introduction to chords. 

Practice Example: 

Let’s try this together! Imagine you are learning how to play a G minor chord. 

1)  First, we find the notes in our G minor chord: G, Bb, and D. 

2)  Play the chord with your hands. (If you’re away from a piano, imagine yourself playing this chord on the blank keyboard image below.) 

3)  Take a really close look at this chord. You want to visualize the notes lighting up at you, like this:

✨ Here’s where the magic happens. ✨ 

We will practice finding this chord with our eyes. 

4)  Take your hand off the piano. Then take your eyes off the piano by looking up at the ceiling. 

5)  Now bring your eyes and hands back to the piano and play the chord.

Go ahead, give it a try! 

How does it feel? 

After just a few repetitions, you are gaining confidence and consistency in finding this G minor chord. Way to go!

By using the play and look away method, you will be shocked at how quickly you can learn new ideas on the piano. 

We have seen countless students quickly thrive on piano using this technique. It cuts through that overwhelming feeling in a matter of seconds. It is magical!

And now you can use it too. 

 
More Resources:

To help you put this concept into practice, here are two free pdfs that are perfect to go with the play and look away method.

• For a free downloadable pdf image that has the keyboard with note names, click here!
• For a free downloadable pdf chart with all the major and minor chords, click here!

What’s next?

We know how hard it can be to get started playing piano. It can seem like there is so much to learn without a clear path to get there. 

We made a beginner’s piano course where we show you exactly what and how to practice. We take out all the guesswork so you know exactly what to do.

We are currently offering our “Beginner’s Bundle” promotion which includes our flagship course, Piano Foundations, along with our Chord Bootcamp and Sheet Music Accelerator courses all for a greatly discounted price! 

We’d love to see you thrive on piano, and we know you can do it. We’re here to help and cheer you on. 

Click here to learn more about the discounted bundle and enroll today!