A while back, I got into a minor debate with a colleague. He asked if there was any particular thing I liked to tell my students that I thought would be a magic key to learning.

I told him, "Yes. The Cycle of General Thirds."

"Huh?" he said. "There isn't a cycle of thirds."

"Sure there is." I then proceeded to explain.

Professionals know what they know so well that they never think of simple things like this. First of all, The Cycle of General Thirds is CEGBDFAC. Why start with C? Why not? C is the the simplest scale on the piano. No black notes. And it's the scale all beginners start with, therefore, the simplest chord derived from the simplest scale is the C Major chord.

What's my line?

Students have the hardest time locating written notes on the musical staff. They may know that there's a bass staff and a treble staff; a left-hand staff and a right-hand staff, but then what? They probably heard that "Good boys do fine always," and that "Good boys deserve favor." But what does that have to do with anything?

Well, the first mnemonic tells you the names of the lines of the bass staff, and the other tells you the name of the lines on the treble staff. But, that presumes that you've gone to the (mild) effort of memorizing the names of just those two lines, G in the bass and E in the treble. Most students don't.

Now if you haven't noticed, each line on any staff that's higher than the one below it is a third higher. For instance, you know that the bottom line of the treble staff is E. Well, the next one has to be G, and the next one has to be B and so on. No mnemonic needed.

If you knew your Cycle of Thirds, and you knew your bottom lines, you then could just recite the cycle from the appropriate note. G on the bottom of the bass staff (GBDFA) and E on the bottom of the treble staff (EGBDF). Easy. Now you know.

Then, if you needed to read notes on ledger lines, those extension lines above or below the staff, rather than panic, you could just recite the cycle from wherever you were. For instance, the top line of the treble staff is EGBD... F. If, God forbid, you should have to play a note on the 4th ledger line higher than that F, all you'd have to do is say, FACE. The note is E. All because you know The Cycle of General Thirds.

How harmonious!

Chords are what create harmony, and chords are made of 3rds. That means that, on the written staff, notes on 3 consecutive lines or on 3 consecutive spaces are chords.

In the illustration above, we see a treble staff. And we know by now that the bottom note of the treble staff is E. Therefore all 3 notes are, from the bottom, EGB in the first group on the left. To the right, we start one letter name higher, on F. The 3 consecutive note letter names then are FAC. And so it goes depending on what the bottom note is of the group, you have all your chords. By the way, the minimum number of notes needed is 3 to make any chord.

Note: Make sure you practice blurting out the letter names in groups of three: "EGB, GBD, BDF," etc. The reason is that you don't want to have to stop and think about it. Reading is an instantaneous process, made instantaneous by repetition, just like knowing your phone number.

So easy! Right?

Yes and no. I said that this was The General Cycle of Thirds. What that means is that the letter names, in their fundamental form, will always flow according to the Cycle. That's letter names only. What it won't tell you is when you need to use sharps and flats.

That's bad right? No. It's perfectly fine. Remember, the student didn't even know how a chord was made up until two minutes ago. Just knowing this puts you miles ahead of where you were. Your recourse before would have been to memorize every chord as if it had no relation to anything else. And as we all know, rote learning is tedious and a wasteful use of time.

So please, if you're a student, do yourself a favor: Learn the General Cycle of Thirds. You'll understand harmony sooner and you'll learn to read music 10 times faster.

One of the strangest phenomena I've run across in my years of teaching, is students' unwillingness to count. Not so much for students of pop music, where they can “feel” rhythms and beats, but rather, for students of Classical music and of piano where they see rhythms and beats.

For classical musicians, it’s essential that one counts. Classical musicians are handed printed music, not recordings after all, and the only way to decipher rhythms on the page is by counting. The same goes for piano students studying from a book. In the book is “written” notation. It’s essential that you not only recognize the note names, but where those notes are placed on the rhythmic time grid.

As a reader, you must know where beat one is. And only if you know where beat one is, can you know where beats 2, 3 and 4 are. You could compare it to a calendar where days, months and years are systematically marked off with the passing of time. You need to know where January is, and where Monday is, etc. If you don’t know, there’s no order, and as I’ve said for decades, “The human mind craves order.”

I've noticed that part of the unwillingness to count comes from self consciousness; the student feels silly counting out loud. They feel like they’re being asked to do something that they would have done in first grade.

The student also feels uncomfortable hearing the sound of their voice in the room. Really. It’s not uncommon to ask a student to count out loud — so I can tell if they’re counting correctly, as opposed to me counting for them — and have them burst into a fit of giggles and blushes. I then have to explain what’s happening to them, so I simply insist that “we just get it over with” and count out loud, assuring them that the so-called pain that they’re feeling will disappear in a few minutes when their critical mind gets bored with criticizing.

The critical mind is like a bully. The bully loves to see you squirm and sweat. It loves to hear you make excuses, because excuses make you look foolish. And you looking foolish is a great treat for the bully. But when you don’t react, you don’t sweat and you don’t make excuses, the bully loses interest and moves on to his next target. Then you’re free.

The by-product of your freedom is a new skill: The Mastery of Rhythm, because rhythm is an inflexible and essential part of music. You can’t ignore or deny its existence any more than you can or deny ignore  the existence of gravity.

So why waste your time fighting it? Count. Counting is the calculator you use to play rhythm. And you can always trust your calculator.