IF THERE’S ONE TUNE every pianist needs to be able to play, it’s Happy Birthday. The problem is, everyone sings in a different key, so where should you start? In my…

THERE’S A TRICK USED BY MUSICIANS when they get lost: it’s called the cycle of fifths. It’s a kind of satnav device that allows you to get back home from just…

I STARTED PLAYING THE PIANO IN PUBS at the age of 16. People would ask for a well-known song, and I couldn’t admit I didn’t know it – so I spent a few…

THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH WRITTEN MUSIC tend to regard scores as an impenetrable mass of dots and lines. But it’s really quite straightforward: it’s just a graph of time (on the horizontal…

WHILE YOU CAN PLAY MOST SONGS with just three chords, you get a lot more flavour if you add the relative minors of each of these chords. These are chords three…

EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT MUSICAL you’ll have heard people pouring scorn on bands like Status Quo, who appear to know only three chords. But why those three chords? What’s special about…

ALL MUSICAL NOTES ARE PRODUCED by vibrating air. That vibration can be caused by a plucked string (in the case of a piano or a harp), or by wind bouncing…