About Randy Peck

Welcome to my piano website, where I talk about music literacy and how to practice piano.

Here I create courses that focus on the principles of music literacy. Proficient piano players apply these principles to their practice to read music with fluency and develop skills in much less time.

Deciding to pursue music as a career changed my life forever. To stay close to music meant that teaching piano lessons was the most stable source of income for myself and my family. Here’s what happened:

I started teaching piano lessons back in 2007 while I was a college student. I kept teaching all through college. In 2010 I finished my degree in piano performance, and in 2012 I finished a master’s degree in piano performance. That year we moved to Seattle and I grew my teaching into a full-time job.

Since college I have been fascinated with education principles and instructional design. At first, I was interested in creating apps that would assist practice. But the more I learned in my experience as a teacher, the more certain I was that app-driven learning isn’t the solution to learning piano.

After putting in the 10,000 hours of teaching music (on top of my 10,000 hours of learning music) I started to see patterns among my students. Successful students all had something in common - it was that they applied correct principles of music literacy to their practice.

I came to realize that only accurately applying true principles of practice results in progress.

Tutorials, shortcuts, or alternative music notation are all over the internet. But getting into the actual written language of music is commonly missing. Written notation is older than the piano. It’s valuable, and I hate to see it discarded for new trends or technology.

My missions is to enable you to read the sheet music of whatever music you want to play. It’s to teach you how to approach and practice it to see results fast.

My mission is not to teach you lead sheets and chords and how to “play by ear". There is nothing wrong with those approaches, and I encourage them, but I’m not the person for that. (Don’t get me wrong - I love playing lead sheets and improvising and I do it a lot).

But all other approaches are incomplete without music literacy skills.


But these skills have to be demonstrated. Videos and at-your-own-pace courses are the perfect way to learn these principles of piano reading.

If you talk to a proficient pianist, ask them what they’re doing to read music better.
They can’t actually tell you. It was my biggest frustration growing up, because nobody could tell me what they were doing.
It’s as though the language around sight-reading is just “do it until you figure it out”.
So then I want to ask the question, “do WHAT exactly?”

That’s the thing we want to learn. The approaches, and the visual / tactile / and aural habits of someone who is proficient at reading and playing sheet music.

I can’t claim that you will become instantly a virtuoso through my courses. Your reading ability will never outpace your hands’ ability to play. But almost every pianist experiences a GAP between their ability to play and their ability to read music. And my goal is to help close that gap, starting from how we begin to learn to read music, all the way through advanced sight-reading skills.

Teaching a full studio of students during covid was a transitional phase for my. I learned the specific advantages to learning from a screen, and the specific disadvantages that can only be overcome by creating video courses, not just 1-to-1 learning.

In-person piano lessons are great for a number of reasons, but online courses have huge advantages for the learner over traditional lessons.

In 2021 I built my first piano-learning site (and learned a LOT from that process). I realized that in order to do this effectively I can’t talk about everything, I have to talk about something specific. And that’s when I decided to focus as much as possible on helping online piano learners build piano literacy. Then I did a launch of my first course called Sight Reading Secrets. Sight Reading Secrets has expanded and turned into “Sheet Music Mastery” and continues to evolve and grow.

In 2022 I started pianoreading.com. I built two courses - “Piano Notes Bootcamp” and “Count Out Loud”.

Current Projects for pianoreading.com. Coming Soon!

- Intervalic Reading Course - a course that focuses on the principle of intervalic note-reading and what the eyes and hands do for each interval. This is the follow-up course for Piano Note Bootcamp.
- Additional content for “Count Out Loud”
- A full course on piano technique
- A full course on piano expression
- Additional content for “Sheet Music Mastery”