A 10-minute piano routine for beginners

Four blocks, always in the same order: find a few notes, play a pattern, practise a chord, then make a little music with all of it. The first three warm up your eyes and fingers; the last one is the reason you sat down. Each block below comes with a short demo to listen to before you play.

The timer is there if it helps. You can pause it, skip a block or ignore it completely: nothing on this page waits for it.

Pick one note for today and find every copy of it on your keyboard, from the lowest to the highest. Say its name as you press it. Use the black keys to find it: C sits left of each pair, F left of each group of three, G inside the group of three.

Tomorrow, pick another one. After a week you will have walked through most of the white keys without ever reciting a list.

Place your hand on C, D, E, F and G, one finger per key. The pattern climbs in groups of three notes, each group starting one key higher, then comes back down the same way. The overlapping groups make the fingers take turns, which helps keep the hand even.

Choose a tempo where every note sounds equally long and equally loud, even if it feels slow. Play it a few times with the right hand, then with the left, an octave lower. Only nudge the tempo up when the slow version feels easy.

If one group trips you up, take it out on its own: play just those three notes a few times, then put it back into the pattern.

Take the C major chord, C, E and G. Press the three keys together, let go completely, and press them again: the aim is to find the shape without looking. Then break it up, one note at a time, and finish with the left hand, which plays the same chord with fingers 5, 3 and 1.

Listen as much as you look: the three notes should start at the same instant and sound about equally loud. Once C feels comfortable, swap it for another chord on other days: the first chords guide has F, G and Am.

Now put it together. The right hand plays a short original tune on the five notes of block 2; the left hand holds a chord at the start of each bar. For G, the left hand plays B, D and G: the notes of G major, arranged so that the hand barely moves from C (you will see why in the guide on inversions).

Learn the tune with the right hand alone, then add the left. Turn on the loop and play along with it. If a wrong note slips in, keep going: staying in time matters more here than playing every note.

When you know the tune, make it yours: change a note or two in the third bar, or slow it right down and let the chords ring. The chord names under the keyboard light up as the loop goes round, so you always know where you are.

Ten minutes is not a magic number. It is a format that is easy to fit into a day, which makes it easier to come back to often. Some days you will want to stay longer: lengthen the last block. On a busy day, do only blocks 1 and 4. If your hand or wrist starts to hurt, stop and rest.

Change the material every few days rather than the structure: another note to find, another chord, another pattern. When the five-note pattern becomes too easy, practising a scale with short patterns is a natural next step.

It can also help to write one line after each session: the note of the day, the chord, the tempo of the pattern. The next session then starts where this one stopped, and you can see what has changed over a few weeks.