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How to use this

Do the drills in order. Ten focused minutes a day beats one long sitting — the goal is for this to become automatic, and automatic comes from short, frequent reps.

This week leans hard on D minor, F major, and C major, because those three carry El Dorado. The other three keys (G major, A minor, E minor) are there once the first three feel easy. Don't try to hold all six at once — that's how last week got heavy.

🖥 Screen drill — click the on-screen keys, no piano needed. 🎹 Keyboard drill — needs your real keyboard.

Your D and E keys are out for repair (911 Keys & Sound). Everything marked 🖥 works fully on screen in the meantime. Save the hands-together routine (🎹) for once it's fixed.

Drill 01 · 🖥

Find any white key, fast

This week you lost F and G a few times, and once landed an octave off. Fix the map of the keyboard before anything else sits on top of it.

The landmark trick: black keys come in groups of 2 and 3. C is the white key just left of every 2-group. F is the white key just left of every 3-group. Find those two and every other letter falls into place.

Find: F Streak 0 · best 0

Octave doesn't matter here — any F on the board counts. The point is the shape, not the spot.

Drill 02 · 🖥

Which note bends in this key

You had this backwards this week — D minor is the key where you do play B♭, not the one where you avoid it. Lock down which single note flips in each key.

Every key uses all seven letters (A–G). Most keys just bend one of them up or down. Answer which note you actually play:

In D minor, do you play…

Correct 0 / 0

Key	Notes	Bends	Shares notes with

The shortcut: a minor key uses the same notes as the major a step-and-a-half above it. D minor borrows from F major — so they bend the same note (B♭). Same for A minor / C (none) and E minor / G (F♯).

Drill 03 · 🖥

Build the chord yourself

Last lesson every chord got spelled out for you note by note. The move you're missing is small: skip a key. Once it's in your hands you'll never need it dictated again.

A chord is just three scale notes stacked: start on a note, skip the next scale note, take the one after, skip again, take the next. Pick a key and a starting note, then click the three keys.

Key Start on scale note

Build: the chord on D

Gold dots mark the scale's seven notes when you hit Show the scale. Your chord = the dot you start on, skip a dot, next dot, skip a dot, next dot.

Drill 04 · 🖥 then 🎹

Fingering & the thumb tuck

Cross-under and cross-over got tangled this week, and you named fingering as your main wall. Here's the one pattern and the single spot that's tricky.

Right hand, going up: thumb=1, then 2, 3 — then the thumb tucks under your hand to keep going. Coming back down, your fingers cross over the thumb. Under on the way up, over on the way down.

Show fingering for

F major's one catch: the thumb won't sit comfortably on a black key, so you keep finger 4 on B♭ and tuck the thumb onto the white C right after it. That's the spot you and Ted worked on.

Drill 05 · 🎹

Two hands, slow

Your own diagnosis — getting both hands together is the wall. Coming from clarinet, two independent hands is genuinely new wiring. Don't fight it head-on; build it in this order.

1

Right hand alone, ×3 clean. Named fingers, no mistakes, before you move on.

2

Left hand alone, ×3 clean. Same standard.

3

Hands together at half speed. Slow enough that you never stop. If you're stopping, you're going too fast.

4

Nudge the speed up only when a pass is mistake-free. Mistakes mean drop back down, not push through.

Set the pace. Start around 50. The metronome plays here so you can practice against it.

50 bpm

Focus key this week: D minor, then F major. Both fit your working keys once D and E are repaired — until then, run the scales on screen above and keep the hands-together work to your right hand on paper.

Drill 06

This week's checklist

Tick a box each day you do it. The order is the point — top to bottom, and don't add the bonus keys until the priority three feel automatic.

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