Learn Piano! Play Songs, Chords, Scales and Learn About Music Theory, 18000 Piano Students!
Marks Piano · Piano Lessons
18,000 students and 25 hours of free-form living-room lessons, strong on chords and improvisation but weak on structured technique and sheet-reading depth.
A living room, not a conservatory
This course opens with the teacher, Mark of PGN Piano, filming himself literally in his living room, and that framing sets the tone for everything that follows. It is long: four chapters, dozens of episodes, and by the teacher's own count nearly 25 hours of instruction. The pace is unhurried and conversational, closer to sitting next to a knowledgeable friend at the keyboard than following a syllabus. That has real upside for beginners who find formal method books intimidating, but it also means the course sprawls, repeats itself, and occasionally wanders off script mid-lesson while the teacher works something out in real time.
Chapter 1 covers the fundamentals competently: note names on white and black keys, major scales, basic triads, chord progressions, intervals, transposition, and finger exercises. The pacing here is patient almost to a fault, with entire lessons devoted to memorizing where middle C sits and printable worksheets for coloring in key patterns. A true beginner will appreciate the hand-holding. Anyone who already reads a lead sheet will want to skip ahead, and the course structure makes that easy since each episode states plainly who can bypass it.
Where the course earns its keep
The strongest material sits in the middle chapters, where chord theory turns practical. The Circle of Fifths lesson is taught as a drawing exercise, building the circle by hand from C outward in fifths, then using it to find related major and minor chords without hunting note by note on the keyboard. That is a genuinely transferable skill. Even stronger is the breakdown of a real pop song by section, showing how a verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and bridge can share and vary just a handful of chord shapes, and how learning four chord progressions is enough to accompany an entire song. This is the closest the course comes to teaching a musician's mindset rather than a list of facts.
Later material on slash chords, split chords across both hands, modes (Dorian through Locrian), and jazzing up a song with extended chords pushes into intermediate territory that many "learn piano" courses skip entirely. The chapter on reading MIDI files as a practice and transcription tool is a practical touch rarely covered elsewhere, walking through how note bars correspond to keys and how to estimate a song's difficulty before committing to learning it.
Where it falls short
The course is weaker on classical technique and physical fingering discipline; hand-position and finger-numbering guidance is thin relative to the volume of theory covered. Sight-reading gets only a single dedicated pass, treated almost apologetically by a teacher who admits he is "not a massive sheet music fan," which shortchanges students who specifically want that skill. The two featured songs, arranged from Bach and Ludovico Einaudi, are pleasant on-ramps but not enough repertoire to build real playing stamina across 25 hours of content.
Production values are inconsistent. Several lessons include unscripted asides, a caught mistake mid-tutorial about test-question numbering, and audio that varies in clarity between segments. None of this breaks the course, but it signals that the material was assembled informally rather than tightly edited, and a student expecting the polish of a conservatory-produced curriculum will notice the seams. For a self-taught hobbyist who wants to understand chords, improvise a little, and play a few songs by ear, the trade-off is worth it. For anyone chasing rigorous, exam-ready piano technique, it is not the right fit.
The standout
The lesson on deconstructing a song's chord progression by section (intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge) and reducing it to four repeatable chord shapes is the single technique most likely to unlock playing real songs fast.
What you will learn
- Note names, scale construction, and how to build major/minor chords across all twelve keys
- How to figure out chord progressions and use the Circle of Fifths to transpose and find related chords quickly
- How to play by ear and reverse-engineer the chord structure of a real pop song (Adele's Someone Like You used as the working example)
- How to read basic sheet music, time signatures, and MIDI note charts
- How to add pedal technique, arpeggios, and jazz voicings (7th/9th chords) to already-known chord shapes
- How to compose a simple original piece and structure a practice schedule
Best for: An absolute beginner or self-taught noodler who wants to play recognizable songs and understand pop/classical chord logic without formal conservatory drills.
Skip it if: Anyone wanting rigorous technique training, graded repertoire, sight-reading fluency, or a tightly edited, professionally produced curriculum.