My first teacher kept a metronome on the piano and a stopwatch in her hand. I came up in the classical tradition — recital halls, RCM exams, a studio upstairs from a music store that smelled like rosin. By fourteen I had recorded an album of my own short pieces on a borrowed microphone in a carpeted living room. I thought I was a composer. Mostly I was a kid with a very good reading muscle and very little else.
For a long time after that, I could play almost anything you put in front of me and almost nothing you played me. I'd sit at a party while someone picked out a tune on the piano, and I'd know — with an almost physical certainty — that I had no idea how they were doing it. I could spell every key signature, name every cadence, sight-read a Mozart sonata cold. But ask me what chord just went by in a jazz standard and I'd stall. The notes on the page were a language I was fluent in. The notes in the air were a language I'd somehow skipped.
In my twenties I went into software. I played for weddings, funerals, church services — the way a lot of conservatory kids keep piano alive once the degree is over. It was paid, it was real, and it was the exact opposite of what I needed. Weddings reward reading. Funerals reward reading. Liturgical work rewards reading. The muscle I had kept getting stronger. The muscle I didn't have kept not existing.
The turn came from a jazz teacher who refused to let me open a real book. He would play two chords and ask me what the second one felt like relative to the first. Not what it was called. What it felt like. Home, leaving home, coming back. The pull of the leading tone. The strange suspension of a tritone sub. He gave me the vocabulary of functional hearing — the thing I should have had at fourteen and somehow never picked up — and a year of that undid about a decade of the other.
Pianoria is the notebook I wish I'd kept during that year. Each cover is a song I figured out by ear, with the audio, the prose, and the harmonic analysis all in one place. The covers are free and always will be — that's not the business. The business is a course called Play Piano By Ear, built from the same method, and a small shop of original compositions and public-domain arrangements I've made for my own playing. The free 7-day ear-training PDF is the front door. Everything else is what you find once you're inside.
Pianoria is not a classroom. I'm not credentialed to teach you piano and I'm not pretending to be. This is a record: what I noticed, in what order, with the receipts attached. If you're a player in the middle path — past the method books, not headed for a concert career, still curious about what the chord under your hand is actually doing — you're the person I'm writing for. Mostly because I'm that person too.