Today
Reading comes first in the session, always. Not last — last means never.The daily core — 25 min, every day
The three rules
- Never stop.
- Never correct.
- Never memorize.
Wrong note, wrong rhythm, wrong hand — keep going. Pick a tempo slow enough that this is possible: usually about half what feels dignified. Memorize a piece because you want to perform it, never to get past a passage you can't read. And no annotations on the page.
Today's block
The Week
6–8 hrs/week. ~55 min on weekdays, ~90 min on each weekend day.
Scale down proportionally on bad weeks — but never cut the daily core, and never move reading out of first place.Every day — 25 min core
Mon–Fri — 30 min on top
Sat & Sun — 90 min each
Two structural rules
- Reading comes first in the session, always.
- Add the teacher as a 60-min weekly or biweekly slot — and subtract it from the repertoire blocks, not from the daily core.
The Five Tracks
1 · Sight-reading
Playing music you have never seen, in real time, at a level far below what you perform.
You read shapes, not noteheads — and that only works if the material is easy enough that you are never saturated.The drills
- Drill A — cold reading. 15 min daily. New material you have never seen. One pass only, never repeated. Never read the same piece twice in the same month.
- Drill B — speed-learning. 25 min, Saturday. Take a piece 2–3 grades below you and get it to a decent performance in one or two sittings, not three weeks.
- Eyes ahead. Target: eyes on beat 3 while the hands play beat 1. Force your eyes one bar ahead while cold-reading. Reading off a screen helps — you physically can't glance down and keep your place.
- Never look at your hands. Drape a towel over them and play scales, arpeggios and easy pieces blind. Ten minutes.
Keep A and B separate. Collapsing them into "I'll just practise my pieces more" is why reading plateaus.
Material
- SightReader — free tier gives 54 real graded pieces, no card. Plug the Clavinova in over USB-MIDI first; without MIDI it withholds rhythm feedback. Start at Grade 2.
- Sight Reading Factory — $34.99/yr, unlimited fresh exercises. "Disappearing bars" is a direct eyes-ahead trainer.
- Paul Harris, Improve Your Sight-Reading! — Levels 2 and 4, ~$12 each. Level 2 builds speed, Level 4 measures.
- Cajita de Música Argentina — free, 19 folklore arrangements with piano parts and reference audio.
- Schumann, Album for the Young Op. 68 — 43 short pieces, ~$12. The first half is the sight-reading half.
- Bach, Notebook for Anna Magdalena — free on IMSLP.
- Burgmüller, 25 Progressive Pieces Op. 100 — level 6–8, so this is Drill B material, not cold reading.
- sightreading.training — free, raw symbol-to-key speed.
The three numbers — log them monthly in a note on your phone
- SightReader grade + average score (note accuracy and rhythm separately — rhythm is the leading indicator).
- Clean-first-pass rate — out of 10 fresh pieces at your grade, how many had zero stops. Promote at 8/10.
- Highest grade with a clean first pass — one integer. Expect it to move about one grade per quarter at 15 min/day.
2 · Functional harmony
Harmony you perform instead of write. Labelling chords on paper does not chunk a score; playing them does.
Chunking is applied harmony — you can't see "Fmaj7 over an A bass" as one object until you know what it is and why it's there.The drill — Monday, 30 min
Work the chapters in order, and convert every written exercise into a keyboard exercise. Where it says "write a ii–V–I in four voices," you play it, in three keys, before moving on. Non-negotiable.
Do Hooktheory I ($14.99) and II ($19.99) first — a weekend each — then Open Music Theory v2 (free) for depth. Plus musictheory.net, 10 min/day, for key signatures, intervals and chord spelling until they're automatic.
The analysis protocol — Saturday, 15 min, one piece at a time
- Print a clean copy. Pencil. Keep the analysed copy separate from the one you play from.
- Bar-line the harmonic rhythm first — mark where the harmony changes, before naming anything.
- Name the bass note of each change. Bass first, always: it tells you the function and the inversion.
- Stack the chord and name it — letter name + quality first ("C# minor"), then the Roman numeral ("i").
- Mark function, not just identity. Tonic / predominant / dominant. Circle every cadence and name it.
- Bracket what isn't a chord — passing tones, suspensions, appoggiaturas, pedal points.
- Box every chromatic chord and explain it in one margin phrase. If you can't write the phrase, go find it in OMT.
- Play your own reduction. Score closed. Only the chord changes, in rhythm, block voicings, both hands.
First subjects: Moonlight 1st mvt — check yourself against the Hooktheory TheoryTab and Moonlight and Mode Mixture; look for diminished chords, a Neapolitan sixth, chromatic voice leading and secondary dominants. Then one pop song: "Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón" (Em – D6 – Cmaj7 – Bm7 – Am7). Cross-check pop songs against the TheoryTab library.
Also worth owning
- Ken Johansen, Harmony at the Piano (~$45) — if you buy one paid theory book, buy this one. Melody harmonisation, score reduction, transposition.
- Video when a concept won't land: Michael New (fundamentals), Signals Music Studio (applied pop/rock harmony), Nahre Sol (how a pianist thinks about harmony).
3 · Chords & lead sheets
The band skill: read a chord chart and produce a part a singer and a guitarist can play over.
This is mostly independent of the reading problem, so it pays off fast while reading grinds.The ladder — in order, a week or two each
- Chord symbol literacy. Instant: maj, m, 7, m7, maj7, 6, sus2/sus4, add9, dim, aug, and slash chords (
C/E,Am/F#). Slash chords matter in Argentine rock. - Shell voicings. Root + 7th (or root + 3rd) in the left hand. Two notes, nothing else. Frees the right hand and costs almost nothing in working memory.
- Inversions for voice leading. Play I–IV–V–I in a key, then replay it choosing inversions so no voice moves more than a step or two. Then three more keys.
- Rootless / upper-structure voicings. Right hand plays 3-7-9 or 7-3-5. Only once you're actually playing with a bass player — don't front-load it.
- Comping patterns by genre. Block chords on the backbeat; broken-octave eighths; the arpeggiated-eighths ballad texture; sustained pad plus fills. Primer: Yamaha — Pop/Rock Chord Voicings.
- The one-progression-all-12-keys drill. Take
I–V–vi–IV. Play it in C, then G, D, A, E, B, F#, Db, Ab, Eb, Bb, F. Shell voicings, then with inversions, then with a comping rhythm. Ten minutes a day for two weeks. Then repeat withi–VI–III–VII(most of Argentine rock) andii–V–I. - Nashville Number System. Learn it in an afternoon — chords as scale degrees, so
1 5 6m 4is the same chart in every key. Sweetwater explainer · chart · converter.
Where to get charts
- La Cuerda (Charly García index) — free, and the archive for Argentine rock. Often has a piano-specific version. Your primary source.
- Cifra Club (cifraclub.com) — free, better curated for Latin American repertoire. Cross-check against La Cuerda.
- iReal Pro (~$20 one-time) — the charts vary, so don't learn songs from it. Buy it for the backing-track engine: it plays any progression in any key at any tempo, which is how you drill step 6 against a rhythm section.
- Hal Leonard fake book ($50–65) — professionally edited, the most reliable source by a distance. Volume of melody-plus-chords reading material.
- Ultimate Guitar — use when a "Certified" version exists. MuseScore — user-uploaded, verify everything against a recording.
4 · Hand independence
Direct work on running two parts at once — a left hand that holds while the right hand does something else.
Your hands aren't uncoordinated; they're starved of attention. Every pattern you chunk is attention you get back.The mechanic — do this before any repertoire
- Each hand separately, to over-automation. Not "until I can play it" — until the left hand runs while you hold a conversation. If you can't talk over it, combining will fail.
- Combine at a tempo where nothing is in doubt. Usually 50–60% of target.
- Asymmetric attention drill. Both hands, but listen only to the left for 8 bars, then only to the right for 8 bars.
- The ostinato test. Build a 10–12 note left-hand ostinato using all five fingers. Loop it until it's thoughtless. Then improvise a right-hand melody over it.
The Bach path
- Now: 3–4 of the easier Little Preludes (free on IMSLP), or the graded Kjos Eighteen Little Preludes edition. Pick individual pieces — BWV numbers are not a teaching sequence.
- In parallel, reading material only: a handful of Anna Magdalena minuets as Drill B speed-learning. Two sittings each, then move on.
- Month 6–9: one Two-Part Invention — BWV 772 (C major) or BWV 775 (D minor). Not before.
- Also: Burgmüller Op. 100 (melody + independent accompaniment, levels 6–8) and Czerny Op. 821 for syncopation against a steady pulse.
In your own repertoire — do these alongside
- Boogie left-hand patterns. Simon Tyler, Boogie Woogie Piano: Riffs Vol. 1 (~$20) — 60 bass lines with audio at full and half speed. Pick 5, get each conversation-proof, then improvise over them.
- Folklore ostinati. The left hand holds a fixed rhythmic-harmonic figure while the right carries melody — and the two hands are in different metres, which is harder and more useful than most classical études.
- The chacarera birritmia. Right hand in 6/8, left hand marking 3/4. Genuine polymetry, and the entry ticket to the repertoire you care about.
The folklore patterns, concretely
- Chacarera. The piano transposes the bombo onto the keyboard: the aro becomes the right hand's chord in the upper register, the parche the left hand's bass down low. Left hand: three quarter-notes per bar (or a rest plus two), marking the 3/4, using root + fifth. Right hand: arpeggiating or spreading the chord in 6/8. Pianos Puch · Javi29.
- Zamba. Same 3/4-against-6/8, slower. The cell has five attacks: on eighth 1, between 2 and 3, on 3, on 4, on 5 — accenting every two eighths (1, 3, 5) and every three (1, 4) at once. Right hand carries the head as dotted-eighth + sixteenth; left hand spreads chords with the low notes as the parche. Pianos Puch · Javi29.
- Chamamé. 6/8, and the piano emulates the accordion. Bass in 6/8 with the right hand playing block chords or arpeggiated; or straight arpeggiation in 6/8, one chord per bar.
- Milonga. The 3-3-2 cell over a habanera-derived bass. Simplest to install, and the bridge to tango.
- Huayno and carnavalito — the Andean duple-metre pair, the easiest entry point of the set if you want a quick win. Malambo is genuinely hard.
5 · Ear
Following chord changes in a band in real time: hear whether the harmony moved, and whether it moved to the 4, the 5 or the 6m. Functional hearing, not interval hearing.
This track exists to serve the band skill, and it will quietly eat your whole practice schedule if you let it.The drill — 10 min a day, hard cap
- Functional Ear Trainer v2 — free. Start here. Plays a cadence to establish the key, then a note, and you identify its function within the key.
- ChordProg Ear Trainer (Android, ~$5) — 500+ real audio clips of chord progressions. Your second tool, and the closest to the actual band scenario.
- Tonedear and Teoria — free, browser, zero-friction for a 10-minute block.
The non-app version, which is better
Every time you learn a song from a chord chart, sing the root of each chord before you play it, and name its number. Ten songs of that beats a hundred hours of app drills — it binds the sound to the function to the physical key, all three at once.
Listen to these
Ariel Ramírez (start here — Misa Criolla, "Alfonsina y el mar") · Adolfo Ábalos (the canonical chacarera pianist) · Lilián Saba · Manolo Juárez · Hilda Herrera · Carlos Aguirre · Lito Vitale · Cuchi Leguizamón (the zamba harmony everyone else borrows from).
Repertoire
Eight starter pieces. Each is achievable now, and each teaches one named thing. Do them roughly in this order.
In Argentine folklore the harmony is often three chords and the rhythm is the whole content — install the patterns by hand, from a model recording.Zamba de mi esperanza
Teaches: the zamba birritmia pattern in isolation. Harmony is essentially I–IV–V, so 100% of your attention goes to the rhythm.
Build this one by hand from the pattern, not from a score. It's your pattern lab — get the five-attack cell and the dotted-eighth-sixteenth head into your hands here, and every other zamba becomes a reading problem instead of a rhythm problem.
Alfonsina y el mar
Teaches: real zamba repertoire by the reference pianist, plus a minor-key progression with genuinely beautiful voice leading — the ideal first subject for the analysis protocol.
Multiple free arrangements at different difficulties on MuseScore; verify against a Mercedes Sosa recording.
Chacarera del rancho
Teaches: the 6/8-vs-3/4 hemiola — the most characteristic thing in the folklore canon and the best hand-independence exercise here. Adolfo Ábalos is the canonical chacarera pianist, so you have an authoritative model recording to copy.
Expect three weeks. Worth three months.
Merceditas
Teaches: the 6/8 chamamé bass-chord alternation — accordion emulation. Trivially simple harmony, instantly recognisable, and the easiest folklore pattern to get sounding right. A confidence win between the chacarera and the rock block.
Barro tal vez
Teaches: shell voicings and singing while playing. Slow, sparse, few chords, enormous payoff per unit of difficulty. The best piece here for the drill of singing chord roots.
Chart: La Cuerda. Kaseiri transcribed it, so an authoritative version exists.
Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón
Teaches: descending stepwise bass carrying diatonic seventh chords — Em – D6 – Cmaj7 – Bm7 – Am7. This is the pop-analysis piece: twenty minutes on it beats a textbook chapter on seventh-chord function.
Chart: La Cuerda.
Canción para mi muerte
Teaches: comping, not playing. Learn this one only from a chord chart — no score, ever. Your job is to produce a rhythm-section part a singer and a guitarist can play over. The band skill, isolated.
Chart: La Cuerda.
Promesas sobre el bidet
Teaches: piano-idiomatic Argentine rock — inversions, voice leading, and García's harmonic habits. Medium difficulty, worked piano tutorials exist, and it's in the Villar/Melos book.
Your 3-month stretch target.
Parked — months 9–12
"Desarma y sangra" · "Inconsciente colectivo" · "Seminare" · "11 y 6" · one Cuchi Leguizamón zamba.
Also parked: "Cinema Verité," "Rasguña las piedras" done properly, most of Clics Modernos and Piano Bar. That's Charly playing like Charly — a 12-month goal, not a starting line.
Where to find scores
- Cajita de Música Argentina — free. Score + audio + video explaining the accompaniment. Start with Agitando pañuelos (piano part) and La olvidada (piano part). Full index.
- Piano y Folklore and Biblioteca de Folklore Argentino — free PDF archives of Argentine folklore piano scores.
- INAMU — libros y cuadernillos, free download. Includes the Cuchi Leguizamón volume.
- Guilo Villar, Rock Argentino para piano (~$20) — Cerati, Spinetta, García, Fito, Calamaro, Aznar, Gieco. The easiest Argentine-rock piano book to actually buy from California.
- Lilián Saba, Piano Folklore — if you buy one folklore-piano book, make it hers. Argentine-published; usually needs sourcing from Argentina.
- Gustavo Molinari, Tango y folklore argentino: Piano sin partituras (Kindle, cheap) — 21 chord-and-pattern arrangements, which is the lead-sheet skill applied to this repertoire.
Milestones
A date, a standard and external judgement — pointed at the goal you named, not at a certificate.3 months — January 2027
- Cold-read Grade 3 material with a clean first pass, 8 times out of 10.
- SightReader rhythm score at Grade 3 ≥ 85%.
- Play
I–V–vi–IVandi–VI–III–VIIin all 12 keys from memory, with inversions chosen for voice leading, no hesitation. - Play the chacarera and zamba accompaniment patterns from memory, in 3 keys, in time with a recording.
- Complete a full written harmonic analysis of Moonlight 1st mvt and play its chord reduction from memory, score closed.
- Perform starter pieces 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 to a recordable standard.
- 5 boogie left-hand patterns automatic enough to improvise over.
- Zero annotations on any new score.
6 months — April 2027
- Cold-read Grade 4–5 material with a clean first pass.
- Comp through a 10-song set from chord charts only, with one other musician, in one afternoon. This is the headline milestone.
- Identify I / IV / V / vi by ear in a real recording, in real time, with >80% accuracy.
- Two Little Preludes performance-ready; one Two-Part Invention started.
- Starter pieces 3, 7, 8 done; "Promesas sobre el bidet" playable.
- Open Music Theory through secondary dominants and modal mixture, every example played in 3 keys.
- Nashville Number System fluent — read and write a chart in any key.
12 months — October 2027
- Cold-read Grade 5–6 material with a clean first pass.
- Play a set with the band. Chord charts only, no written-out parts.
- Sight-read an unfamiliar lead sheet and produce a competent comping part on the first pass.
- One Two-Part Invention performance-ready.
- A 20-piece repertoire spanning folklore, Argentine rock and classical — at least 12 of which you can play from the score rather than from memory.
- Harmonise a melody at sight, by ear, in any key.
- Learn a new 3-chord folklore song by ear alone, no chart.
The recurring deadline
Every 8 weeks: record one piece, in one take, and send it to someone. Non-negotiable, calendared.
Get set up
Under an hour of admin. ~$25 to buy.
Everything expensive in piano education is either an instrument you already own or a classical pedagogy you don't need.Buy
- Paul Harris, Improve Your Sight-Reading! Piano — Level 2 and Level 4. ~$12 each, ~$25 total. Two books, not one: Level 2 is where you build speed, Level 4 is where you measure.
- Optional: Howard Richman, Super Sight-Reading Secrets — used, ~$5. Do not pay $20 new. Only if you want the towel and eyes-ahead drills spelled out.
Free — set these up today
- SightReader — free tier, 54 real graded pieces, no card. Plug the Clavinova into your laptop over USB-MIDI first; without MIDI it withholds rhythm feedback, which is the half you need. Start at Grade 2.
- Functional Ear Trainer v2 — free. The whole ear track.
- Cajita de Música Argentina — free. 19 folklore arrangements: score + audio + video on how the accompaniment works. Your folklore repertoire, your genre instruction and good reading material, all at once.
- musictheory.net — free. 10 min/day on key signatures, intervals and chord spelling.
Then, this week
- Set a recurring 15-minute block, every single day, labelled "reading." This is the one non-negotiable in the whole plan.
- Book the free intake call with Guillermo Paulucci — Programa Piano Folclore. 12 individual online sessions over 16 weeks: chacarera, zamba, huayno, tango, gato, cueca. Price unpublished — ask on the call. The highest-leverage teaching spend available to you.
- Alternative teachers: Superprof Argentina, ~2,000 online teachers from roughly AR$9,000/hr, several specialising in tango and folklore. Screen three, pick one.
Later, optional
- Hooktheory I + II — $35. A weekend each.
- Sight Reading Factory — $34.99/yr, for reading volume.
- iReal Pro — ~$20 one-time, for the backing-track engine.
- ChordProg Ear Trainer — ~$5.
- Tyler, Boogie Woogie LH Bass Patterns — ~$20.
- Villar, Rock Argentino para piano — ~$20.
- Johansen, Harmony at the Piano — ~$45.
Year-one total, excluding lessons: ~$250.
Don't
- Don't register for an RCM or ABRSM exam. Use the RCM syllabus repertoire lists as a shopping list, not a ladder.
- Don't start the Bach Two-Part Inventions yet. Little Preludes first.
- Don't buy a theory textbook. Hooktheory then Open Music Theory, both better for you.
- Don't start transcription-style ear training. 10 minutes of functional work and nothing more.
- Don't annotate scores.