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Music — Quickstart (30 minutes)

If you have 30 minutes today, do exactly these three things at the piano.

Calibrated to: intermediate piano, slow sight reading, little theory

The exercises below assume you can already play with both hands. They're designed to immediately link your existing piano skill to theory you can use in composition.

1. The white-key trick: C major and A minor (10 min)

  • Play C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C with your right hand. That's the C major scale.
  • Now start on A: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A. That's A natural minor.
  • Same notes, different starting point. Same relationship for every key.
  • Play C major scale up and back, hands together. Now A minor up and back.

The takeaway: all 12 major keys + 12 minor keys are the same skeleton, transposed. What you learn in C transfers everywhere.

2. Build the I, IV, V, vi chords in C (15 min)

In C major, four chords cover ~80% of pop songs:

I  =  C-E-G    (C major)
IV =  F-A-C    (F major)
V  =  G-B-D    (G major)
vi =  A-C-E    (A minor)

Play each, slowly, both hands (root in left, triad in right):

LH: C   F   G   A
RH: C-E-G   F-A-C   G-B-D   A-C-E

Now play the progression I–V–vi–IV (the most common pop progression in history):

LH: C    G    A    F
RH: C-E-G   G-B-D   A-C-E   F-A-C

That's the chord skeleton of "Don't Stop Believin'", "Let It Be," "Cruel Summer," "Despacito," and a hundred other songs. Play it slowly, then in time. Hum a melody on top.

3. Capture a fragment (5 min)

  • Open the voice memo app on your phone.
  • Improvise on the I–V–vi–IV progression you just played, RH only. 30 seconds.
  • Save the recording. Title it 2026-04-26 idea 1.

This is how every song starts. The single most important habit for songwriting is recording every fragment — most disappear, but the keepers are gold and you can't trust your memory.

What's next

If you only do one thing

Five minutes of interval drills daily on Tenuto / musictheory.net for 8 weeks rewires your ear. After two months you'll start hearing progressions when you listen to music, knowing they're I–V–vi–IV without thinking. That changes how you write.

What style do you want to write?

Pop, jazz piano, classical-leaning composition, and electronic each have different paths beyond Level 2. The first 3 levels of the tutorial are universal foundations; after that, the tutorial.md Level 4 onward leans pop. If you want jazz piano specifically, supplement with the Jazz Theory Book (Mark Levine) starting at Week 5.