The Online Academy celebrated yet another birthday in October and in this blog post, we share some of our highlights from the last eight years. These include some of our most popular content and online events, plus an update on some new developments and a glimpse of future plans!
Content Highlights
What started as a small collection of a few videos and articles based on Graham Fitch’s Practising the Piano blog, is now an extensive library of over 1,500 videos, articles, eBooks and downloads. The following is a combination of our most popular “evergreen” content plus some more recent rising stars:
- Repertoire – Our most popular series of all time is Graham Fitch’s video walkthroughs of Burgmüller’s 25 Easy and Progressive Etudes. Other popular collections include our video lessons on repertoire from piano examination syllabuses and despite only being published recently, our series on Schumann’s Album for the Young is quickly rising up the ranks!
- Technique – Penelope Roskell’s Art of Piano Fingering, Graham Fitch’s guide to forearm rotation and “Jailbreaking Hanon” are some of the most popular resources in our technique library.
- Skills – Although aimed at advanced pianists, Ken Johansen’s Sight Reading Curriculum is a long standing favourite in our skills library, with David Hall’s course There’s More to Playing the Piano being one of the most popular resources on music theory.
With the consistent growth of our content library, we’ve made a major overhaul to the browse and search functionality in order to make content easier to find. These include a revised content structure for browsing and a significantly improved repertoire search. These developments also serve as a foundation for further updates and refinements!
Online Events
Our online events programme has been incredibly well received since its launch in 2020 and serves as an invaluable complement to our content library. The following are some of our most popular workshops to date:
- Deep Learning & Practice Tools
- Technique Lecture Series
- Style Bundle (Baroque, Classical & Romantic Workshops)
- How to Play Fast
- Creative Practising Using Keyboard Harmony
- Arpeggios, Trills & Tremolos
- I Played It Better at Home
- Demystifying Sight Reading
We’re also currently running two courses which combine online content, activities and workshops. The first of these is Lona Kozik’s music theory course, Harmony, History & Style and the second is The Secrets of Experts presented by Adina Mornell. If you’ve missed any of these, you can still sign-up to join us for the remaining sessions and obtain access to the workshop recordings and resources from previous sessions!”
More information on upcoming and past events is available here and if you’d like to view an example recording of a previous event, you can sign-up here to receive a free recording of Graham Fitch’s presentation on Unlocking your Pianistic Potential.
What’s coming?
As always, we have many exciting projects underway for the year ahead, including a significant volume of content already filmed and undergoing editing. This includes reshoots of some of our “old favourites”, new video lessons for the 2025 & 2026 ABRSM syllabus and much more!
Following on from our recent survey, our online events programme will feature a variety of new topics and we’re planning more interactive formats to help you apply information from our content resources. We will also be building on our recent site updates with with further enhancements and functionality.
We’d like to conclude by once again saying a big thank to all our customers and subscribers. Your ongoing, generous support over the years has been instrumental in enabling us to grow our offering. We are very much looking forward to continuing to help you along the way on your pianistic journeys and to enjoy your piano playing to the fullest!
All the very best,
The Practising the Piano Team
P.S. If you haven’t already, please be sure to sign-up to our mailing list to be notified of new projects and upcoming events!
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