These 6-week Piano Intensives are focused, step-by-step deep dives designed to help you make real progress on one specific skill or tune. Each intensive combines concise recorded lessons with clear practice guidance and live support, so you’re not just watching—you’re actually applying what you learn. You’ll build confidence, develop practical tools you can use immediately, and walk away with a solid, playable result at the piano instead of unfinished ideas.

Improv Jam 101 is a completely new kind of piano course—one that blends hands-on improvisation training with a real community jam experience.

Across four styles—rock/pop, blues, jazz swing, and jazz ballad—you’ll learn how to:

• Play each accompaniment pattern
• Improvise confidently over every groove
• Build walking bass lines and left-hand textures
• Create smooth, musical solo ideas even as a beginner

This course moves at a comfortable pace. If you’ve had just a few months of piano, you’ll be able to follow along easily. Each lesson breaks the concepts down step-by-step so you always know what to practice.

If you want to build your improvisation skills, play with others, stay motivated, and create real music, Improv Jam 101 is the perfect place to start. Join in and I’ll see you in the first lesson.

“De-Mystifying Rhythm,” taught by drummer and educator Mike Marble, is a multi-session class designed to strengthen your sense of time and rhythmic accuracy. The course begins with core fundamentals—pulse, time signatures, note values, rests, and practical counting—and then moves into advanced concepts like tied and dotted rhythms, 8th-note triplets in 4/4 and 12/8, and even 16th- and 32nd-note figures. It’s a clear, structured path for anyone looking to finally understand rhythm and feel more confident in their timing.

Practical Music Theory & Reharmonization teaches only the theory you truly need—always applied directly to real songs, not abstract exercises. Students appreciate its clear, approachable path to understanding jazz harmony without the overwhelming detail of traditional theory books. A major focus is Dominant Motion: what it is, how to spot it, and how to use it to harmonize or reharmonize tunes. The class meets Mondays at 5pm Eastern, with replays available, and requires either a class membership or Academy Credits to participate.

Just Standards was a weekly 30–60 minute solo-piano class focused on building full song arrangements a few measures at a time. Over 4–6 weeks per tune, students created complete cocktail-style arrangements while learning shells, fuller textures, improvisation (TCI), and reharmonization. The first songs covered included “Cry Me a River,” “Send In the Clowns,” “Autumn in New York,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and “My Way.” The class offered material suitable for both beginner and advanced players.

Come learn powerful improvisation techniques with jazz saxophonist John McKenna. John brings a fresh, player-focused perspective that helps you hear, think, and create differently. Discover new approaches to phrasing, tone, rhythm, and solo construction—all through the lens of a seasoned saxophonist who knows how to make improvisation feel natural and fun.

Unleash your creativity with the Creative Pianist Toolkit™ — your roadmap to mastering piano with style and confidence.

Dive into three powerful classes:
1. Theory/Reharm – Learn to analyze tunes, memorize effectively, and create fresh reharmonizations.
2. Standards – Explore jazz, pop, rock, and Latin styles from simple to advanced arrangements that impress any audience.
3. Improvisation – Apply your skills to play freely and confidently beyond the written notes.

Open to all levels. Beginners can start with the 30-Day Piano Playbook™. Guided by Willie’s dual-track teaching, each lesson includes clear direction and a weekly practice plan to keep you progressing—no matter how busy your schedule.

Missed a live coaching session? No problem — you can catch up right here. These replays feature real students sharing their progress, challenges, and breakthroughs in an interactive setting where everyone learns together.

Watch as I guide students through personalized feedback, practical advice, and actionable steps to help them move forward in their playing. Even when you’re not in the hot seat, you’ll gain valuable insights from each coaching moment — perfect for sparking ideas and improving your own practice.

Want to join the next live session? Visit the Event Calendar to see upcoming coaching opportunities and be part of the action.

Building off of my proven The Confident Improviser™ Level 1 program, this masterclass takes you deeper into the art of jazz improvisation. Instead of relying on the same licks and riffs, you’ll learn how to shape solos that flow naturally and connect emotionally with your audience. Through a mix of focused exercises and live masterclass sessions, you’ll develop the skills to create improvisation lines that sound fresh, musical, and personal.

We’ll work directly with jazz standards, exploring how to navigate chord changes, weave together motifs, and use rhythm, harmony, and phrasing to tell a musical story. Along the way, you’ll gain practical tools to expand your vocabulary, boost your confidence, and bring more expression into your playing—whether you’re practicing at home, performing for others, or creating your own unique voice at the piano.

The Confident Improviser LIVE! - Beginner is the perfect starting point for new improvisers or those who want to build a solid foundation. Following my proven The Confident Improviser™ Level 1 program, you’ll learn step-by-step how to create great-sounding improvisations without feeling overwhelmed. We’ll cover simple basslines, 5-finger blues scales, essential rhythms, and easy accompaniment patterns—building your skills one layer at a time. By the end, you’ll have the confidence and tools to improvise freely and musically at the piano.

Chord Play will show you how to get the most music out of even the simplest chord progressions. You’ll learn how to take a basic two-chord loop and turn it into something rich, colorful, and full of movement. Step by step, we’ll explore different ways to “arrive” at a chord, how to break apart and re-build progressions, and how to combine the chords you already know with new ones borrowed from other keys for fresh, exciting sounds.

You’ll also discover how different chords create different moods—and how you can use those moods to spark your improvisation. By the end of the course, you’ll have a set of practical tools to make your playing more interesting, your arrangements more engaging, and your improvisations more expressive, all while deepening your understanding of harmony in a fun, hands-on way.

We will cover arranging techniques across various styles, providing detailed examples and sheet music to help you apply these concepts to your own arrangements. Examples will include jazz, pop/rock, funk, and worship music.

In addition to exploring key concepts, we’ll leave plenty of time for discussion and questions, ensuring you gain a comprehensive understanding that you can confidently bring into your own musical projects.

Whether you're looking to refine your skills or expand your arranging repertoire, this class will offer valuable insights and practical tools.

Join Paul in his engaging “Blues Piano” class, designed for players of all levels, from beginner to advanced. This class dives into essential blues concepts, including classic licks, must-know progressions, and the art of slow blues. Students will have the chance to ask questions and receive personalized feedback on their playing, making it a truly interactive learning experience. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your blues skills, Paul’s expertise and approachable teaching style will help you bring your blues piano playing to life.

Join Nina in her “Jazz Ballads” class, where you’ll explore innovative and advanced techniques for crafting stunning jazz piano ballad arrangements. From lush voicings to dynamic phrasing, Nina will guide you through creative approaches that bring emotional depth and beauty to your playing. Perfect for intermediate to advanced pianists, this class will inspire you to transform classic ballads into unforgettable performances.

Join Nina in exploring the captivating sounds of Brazilian music at the piano. In this class, you'll dive into the mesmerizing rhythms and harmonies of Bossa Nova, beginning with an in-depth breakdown of Antônio Carlos Jobim's classic "O Grande Amor." This class is perfect for pianists who want to enrich their playing with the lush, smooth tones of Brazilian jazz.

After mastering the fundamentals of Bossa Nova, you’ll learn how to seamlessly incorporate these Brazilian and Bossa Nova elements into other beloved jazz standards, expanding your musical repertoire and enhancing your improvisational skills. Whether you're new to Brazilian music or looking to deepen your understanding, this class offers a unique opportunity to infuse your playing with the soulful essence of Brazil.

Learn something new...quickly!

In this new semester of the Creative Pianist Toolkit, we will be focusing on learning two new songs along with theory and improvisation. Creative Pianist Toolkit teaches you Theory, Arranging & Improvisation for each song, giving you a full view of each piece. Learning these three elements helps you to master the entire song by giving you all the tools needed to analyze, play, memorize and improvise over each song.

From mastering the iconic 12-bar blues progression to understanding blues scales and improvisation techniques, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of the blues genre. Through interactive exercises, practical demonstrations, and personalized feedback, you'll hone your piano skills and cultivate your unique musical voice. By the end of Blues Piano 101, you'll feel empowered to confidently play and create blues music independently.

Explore the enchanting world of Advanced Jazz Piano Arranging as we delve into the timeless gem Chelsea Bridge composed by Billy Strayhorn in 1941. In this course, we'll dissect the fundamental structure of the tune and craft a comprehensive solo piano arrangement in the classic jazz ballad style.

Whether you're new to the genre or seeking to refine your skills, this Jazz Piano 101 course offers an immersive exploration of jazz piano fundamentals. This course offers a foundational exploration of jazz piano principles suitable for students seeking a comprehensive understanding of the genre. Throughout the course, students will acquire essential skills necessary for proficient jazz piano performance.

Want to sit down at the piano and actually PLAY songs? Not exercises. Not scales. Real music that fills the room and makes people feel something. This course teaches you simple left-hand rhythm patterns, right-hand chord shapes, and the popular progressions found in pop, rock & country so you can confidently accompany yourself or others.

Your right hand knows the licks, fills, and solos. But your left hand? It fumbles, stiffens up, and can't lock into the groove you hear in your head. This bootcamp changes that by building the independence, strength, and coordination your left hand needs to finally keep up with your musical ideas.

You can play the melody. You know the chords. But how do you turn a lead sheet into a full, polished performance that sounds like YOU? This course takes you step-by-step from basic chord charts to creating your own unique jazz arrangements. You'll learn shell chords, rootless voicings, reharmonization techniques, and how to add professional intros and endings.

Discover how to create beautiful, simple arrangements for jazz standards in Super Simple Standards, a course designed specifically for beginners. This course focuses on building a strong foundation with:

Chord Shells: Master the essential framework of jazz chords.
Breaking Up Shells: Learn how to bring variety and motion to your arrangements.
Simple Left-Hand Motion: Develop confidence with easy left-hand patterns.
Filling in the Right Hand: Add simple melodic fills to complete your sound.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the tools to create your own arrangements for popular jazz standards with ease and confidence. Perfect for beginners ready to bring jazz to life on the piano!

Are these arrangements for SOLO or GROUP playing?

The arrangements and techniques that you'll learn in this course are the absolute FOUNDATION for either solo or group playing. In other words, these techniques are needed whether playing in a group or solo. That said, you'll find these arrangements work very well in both settings!

Anna will be working both singers and non-singers to feel more confident using their voice in their art.

As a pianist and Berklee grad herself, Anna will be there to help students overcome the fear and frustration surrounding playing the piano and singing at the same time. Anna will also give feedback and direction to anyone aiming to improve upon their singing skills, even if they are absolute beginners. All levels are welcome to attend.

Here's what students have to say:

"Amazing experience! Anna Rizzo is a skilled teacher, a great listener and a really sweet person! I came to the session wondering how this training would help me as a pianist and I left the session knowing I would try to sing and start learning how to accompany myself at the piano! Awesome!"
"As the voice is the first instrument, I would say that all musicians will find treasures there. More specifically, those trainings will surely help singers, but not only! They will also be particularly useful to those who play with vocalists, they will better understand their needs."

Music theory is the language of ALL music. It is how musicians speak to each other, and it is how we explain the nuts and bolts that come together to create beautiful songs, arrangements, solos, orchestrations, and productions.

In this course, Music Theory I, we will examine the basic building-blocks of music - the elements of music - from the beginning level. Students will learn to identify, analyze, and write (notate) basic music structures, supported by class lectures, discussions, demonstrations, personal feedback, and exams.

This course will cover the following topics:

Pulse, meter, rhythmic values, rhythmic dictation, the grand staff, treble/bass clef, octaves, accidentals, enharmonics, half/whole steps, chromatic, major scales, major scale formula, key signatures, minor scales, relative/parallel relationships, natural/harmonic/melodic, intervals, triads, chord symbols, inversions, parallel/contrary motion, 7th chords, inversions of 7th chords, articulations, dynamics, etc.

In this class, Paul will feature a new pop tune each session and help students learn the song through the use of performance, active listening, discussion, analysis, guided practice, and professional tips and tricks. Paul will focus on topics such as how to select pop songs that will work well on the piano and that your audience will love, how to break the song into simple sections, how to create an arrangement for solo piano, how to memorize, how-where-and-when to improvise, and how to practice for mastery. Additionally, Paul will occasionally explain and notate music theory concepts as they become applicable.

By participating in this course students will gain a more comprehensive understanding of the political, socio-economic, cultural, geographical, and historical implications that gave rise to what is often described as the only “true American art form” - jazz music. Through lectures, presentations, videos, guided listenings, and demonstrations, students will learn about famous jazz musicians, musical structures, important events, and how to practice “active listening.”

Part 1: Early Jazz 1900-1930

Class #1: The Roots of Jazz

Class #2: New Orleans

Class #3 New Orleans (cont.) 

Class #4: New York in the 1920s

Class #5: Louis Armstrong and the First Great Soloists

Part 2: The Swing Era

Class #6: Swing Bands

Class #7: Swing Bands (cont.)

Class #8: Count Basie 

Class #9: Duke Ellington

Class #10: A World of Soloists

Part 3: Modern Jazz

Class #11: Bebop

Class #12: The 1950s - Cool Jazz and Hard Bop

Class #13: Jazz Composition in the 1950s

Class #14: Miles Davis

Class #15: John Coltrane

In this class, students will engage in a comprehensive process in order to cultivate their aural skills and enhance their ability to learn and play music by ear.
Students Will...
Listen to recordings
Memorize a jazz standard
Acquire the necessary tools and setup to begin transcribing
Learn to “loop” and hear short phrases to begin the transcription process
Learn to identify the pitches and rhythms that were played
Learn to hear the harmonic progression taking place under a solo
Learn what to do with their left hand
Learn to take short, transcribed musical phrases and import essential jazz improvisation vocabulary into their immediate playing abilities
Learn to analyze jazz harmony
Learn to transpose efficiently and effectively, and how to practice transposition to further develop the skill
Learn to build an advanced jazz improvisation vocabulary derived from legendary jazz musicians
Learn how to accurately notate a transcribed solo
and more!

In this class, students will learn to use the music notation software “Sibelius.”

Students Will...

Be introduced to the interface and the most basic fundamental operations
Learn how to set-up a new score
Learn some of the most commonly-used functions such as note entry, rhythm entry, and accidentals
Learn the most commonly used “style guides” for proper piano notation scores
Learn how to enter articulations, dynamics, phrase markings, and chord symbols
Learn to cut-and-paste
Learn to create a lead sheet
Learn to use 1st and 2nd ending repeats
Learn to create rhythm slashes
and more!

In this class Nina will be teaching you how to create your own jazz piano arrangements using a variety of techniques.

You'll learn simple techniques like roots and shells while also expanding your knowledge of jazz piano arranging with fills, runs and the theory needed to make your playing sizzle.

Nina will also be diving into improvisation, solo and group playing and much more.

Ask Nina your questions about jazz piano in these live classes. Nina is also heavily into jazz organ and latin music so you can pick her brain about those topics as well!

Discover how to create beautiful, simple arrangements for jazz standards in Super Simple Standards, a course designed specifically for beginners. This course focuses on building a strong foundation with:

Chord Shells: Master the essential framework of jazz chords.
Breaking Up Shells: Learn how to bring variety and motion to your arrangements.
Simple Left-Hand Motion: Develop confidence with easy left-hand patterns.
Filling in the Right Hand: Add simple melodic fills to complete your sound.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the tools to create your own arrangements for popular jazz standards with ease and confidence. Perfect for beginners ready to bring jazz to life on the piano!

Are these arrangements for SOLO or GROUP playing?

The arrangements and techniques that you'll learn in this course are the absolute FOUNDATION for either solo or group playing. In other words, these techniques are needed whether playing in a group or solo. That said, you'll find these arrangements work very well in both settings!

In level three we will be applying our new improvisation techniques to new, longer progressions that are based on songs. We will also learn new ingredients an accompaniments.

This course is for The Confident Improviser™ podcast lessons.

Speed up your fingers, improve your dexterity and become more fluid at the piano or keyboard using this variety of exercises. You can move through these lessons in any order and use them to generate new practice ideas to master your technique.

In the beginner level, you will be learning how to accompany yourself using simple left-hand chord shells. Later in the course, you'll also learn a simple bassline to use for accompaniment. You will learn improvisation techniques, rhythms, riffs and licks that you can play with your accompaniment and the included backing tracks. We begin with a simple progression with licks, then move to two-hand chords, targeting notes and finish by creating our own blues jam tune.

The intermediate-level course will show you how to play a full jazz/blues progression with chords and extended harmonies. You will learn different melodic, rhythmic and lick ideas to make your soloing 'pop' while also learning how to use your left-hand for more effective comping. The arpeggio and guide tone lesson will help you improve your technique while also showing you how to properly target notes so your improvisation sounds more polished. We will also be covering grace notes, double stops and tremolos...the 'secret sauce' of playing the blues.

In the advanced course, we turn our attention to improvisation over Jazz standards, specifically the tune Beautiful Love. I'll teach you how to improvise over this beautiful standard by beginning with rootless voicings. Next, we will learn the scales that go with each chord and we will build a solo using scales and arpeggios. The secret to a good sounding solo though is targeting notes. Without targeting, your solo will sound 'wandering' and lost. Through targeting, neighbor tones and approaches, we will make your soloing sound pro-level in just a few weeks!

In this course you'll learn the B.B. King song, The Thrill is Gone. You'll learn a bassline accompaniment along with improvisation.

In this course you'll learn how to use the Jazzedge Piano Practice Transformation Plan.

In this course you'll learn more about rootless chords, guide tones, the pentatonic scale and improvisation.

The Blues Progression Matrix makes it easy for you to create an almost endless amount of blues progressions that you can use for songs, your own composition and improvisation. In this course you'll learn different left hand accompaniment patterns along with blues progression "blocks" that you can put together in numerous ways.

In this course, you'll learn how to play Moe Koffman's Swingin' Shepherd Blues with both shells and rootless chords. You'll also have the opportunity to see Willie play the tune along with a live bass player. Plus...you'll get the video play alongs so you can perform with the bass player on your own!

In this collection you will be learning the function of all the controls on the organ so you know what button, knob or slider to change in order to create the sound you need. I will also teach you 6 “must have” organ sounds that need to be in every organist’s toolbox. These are the sounds that make you sound like a know-what-you’re-doin’ musician at the organ and help you stand out from the crowd!

In this collection we will be covering both the classic and rock organ styles. For example, we will be covering the groove and form of Deep Purple’s version of the Joe South song. We will spend a lot of time breaking down different ways of using the organ to create a groove over the chords. Improvisation techniques are also included!

In this collection I am going to show you some organ techniques that I have learned over the years and I’ll show you how I use the drawbars. We will discuss sustaining notes, creating pads and I’ll teach you a cool progression, some chords to go with it and improvisation, too!

In this course I’ll share with you short piano challenges to give you new ideas to practice at your instrument. You do not need to complete each challenge. Do the challenges that you like and take as much time as you need to complete them!

This course is designed to show you how to create your own songs and improvisations allowing you to just "sit and play" for hours. Equal parts composition and improvisation, this has been a very popular course!

In this course you'll learn more classic song arrangements. This course focuses on songs by Carole King, Ray Charles, Journey, The Beatles and more!