The SE22 Piano School - Piano Lessons in East Dulwich, South-East London

Select your level:

Beginners age 3+ | Beginners age 5+ | Beginners, age 7+ | Adult beginners

Books for beginners, age 3+



Ying Ying Ng: Music Theory For Young Children - Book 1, £4.95 Specifically suited to children aged 3 - 6, this book presents music theory using colourful illustrations and stickers for the exercises.	Ministeps To Music Phase One: Hand Positioning, £4.99 An excellent book containing tuneful songs in the basic hand position. This introduces hands together playing from the first page.	A Dozen A Day Mini Book, £4.99 These pre-practice exercises help develop strong hands and flexible fingers. Vital for the youngest pianists to improve coordination. Use as a warm-up every day when you start your practice.


John Thompson's Easiest Piano Course: Part 1, £4.99 Lots of great tunes for beginners, ages 3+. A gentle-paced, engaging piano book.	Manuscript book, £1.75 Essential for your piano lesson. Used to practice drawing notes, notenaming and lots more!	Jessie Blake: Eight Duets For Beginners, £8.99 All my students love this book. The duets sound fantastic and we play pieces from this book at all our student recitals. If you buy only one book on this page, make it this one! This was one of my favourite books when I was learning the piano.


Walter Carroll - Scenes at a Farm , £5.99 Twenty songs about farmyard animals that also include some duets for young pianists. This book is extremely popular with young children.	My First Piano Adventure - Christmas , £3.95 Lots of well-known Christmas songs for students of pre-reading age.	SE22 Piano School T-Shirts, £10 Work by our students for recitals and school trips. Available in lots of colours. See top of this page for a photo of Amaliaand Marisa wearing red and green t-shirts. Available from your teacher.



Books for beginners, age 5+


Chester's Easiest First Solos, £6.95 Very easy pieces that make great performances pieces at recitals and concerts!	Laura Shur: Beginner Keys for Two, £8.99 Another duet book, but this one has parts that students of an equal age can play. Ideal for festivals and school assemblies.	Paul Harris: Improve Your Sight-Reading! - Pre Grade 1 (New Edition), £5.50 It is vital that students learn how to sight-read from an early stage as this will ensure that this vital skill is acquired from an early age. Sight-reading is such a fundamental part of becoming a well-rounded musician. This entire series of books comes highly recommended, as does the Joining The Dots series.


Martha Mier: Jazz, Rags And Blues - £5.95 A fantastic collection of jazzy pieces that our students all love. Great for recital and festival performance pieces.	Pauline Hall: Piano Time Pieces Book 1, £7.50 Piano Time is a hugely successful series for all young beginners, from the very first lesson up to around grade 3. These pieces regularly crop up on the syllabus for the local piano festivals.	Ministeps To Music Phase Two: Five-Finger Fluency, £5.99 One of the best books to explore moving hands out of the basic hand position. Well-paced and contains lots of great performance pieces - Jingle Bells, 3 Blind Mice & more.


Joining the Dots 1, £5.25 Published in 2010, this is a set of five books covering the requirements for the ABRSM sight-reading test. This book is suitable for students that have finished Me & My Piano and are about to start The Prep Test.	Ying Ying Ng: Music Theory For Young Children - Book 2, £4.95 The follow-up book to the excellent first theory book. Again with stickers. Also available in parts 3, 4 and 5.	Jazz Nursery Piano Duets , £6.99 Twelve nursery songs in fixed hand position for beginner students with jazzy teacher accompaniments. These are really fun pieces that sound great!


Books for beginners, age 7+


Rockschool Popular Piano And Keyboards - Debut , £11.99 A brilliant introduction to examinations. Rockschool is about playing the styles of music you enjoy. No scales or sight-reading, just 5 fun, fast and exciting pieces in Boogie Woogie and rock styles!	Pauline Hall: Piano Time Jazz Book 1 , £7.50 Pauline Hall really is the authority when it comes to writing fun, light pieces that are a hit with young pianists. I highly recommend this book as well as the Jazz Duets book.	A Dozen A Day Book One: Primary, £4.99 These pre-practice exercises help develop strong hands and flexible fingers. Vital for the youngest pianists to improve coordination. Use as a warm-up every day when you start your practice.


Joining the Dots 2, £5.75 Joining the Dots offers pianists lots of material to help build confidence and skill in sight-reading. The series brings together a range of activities to help students improve their sense of keyboard geography, helping them to read new music more quickly and easily.	Piano Time Sports Book 1 , £6.99 Using a sporty theme, this books encourages students to warm-up before their practice session with these sporty exercises!	Making The Grade: Preparatory Grade, £5.95 Easy pieces such as 'American Pie', 'Oom Pah Pah', 'Edelweiss' and more.


Theory is Fun Grade 1 , £2.95 Level 2 of Theory Made Easy provides an excellent transition to this theory book that presents the Graded syllabus for the first ABRSM theory in a clear and simple way. Suited to students age 7+.	Prep Test, £3.50 A pre-Grade 1 test. An informal environment where you can play in front of an examiner and receive an encouraging appraisal of your piano playing performance and skills. An excellent preparation for the graded exam system. Ideal for students ages 6 - 10.	A Dozen A Day Book One: Primary, £4.99 These pre-practice exercises help develop strong hands and flexible fingers. Vital for the youngest pianists to improve coordination. Use as a warm-up every day when you start your practice.


Books for adult beginners


Classic Piano Course , £7.95 A fast-moving book for adults with simplified versions of well-known classical songs such as Swan Lake and Fur Elise.	Bastien Beginning Piano For Adults, £14.95 A slower-paced book than the Classic Piano Course. Provides a thorough grasp of rhythmic and theoretical concepts of music as well as playing.	Music Theory In Practice - Grade 1 , £3.25 An in-depth workbook covering the Grade 1 ABRSM syllabus. The option is available to take a written exam upon successfully completing this book and the test papers.

Novice, Grades 1 - 3


The Joy of Boogie and Blues, £9.95 Very catchy boogie and blues tunes. Great for ages 10+ and adults. This is a great stepping stone on the way to jazz piano and improvisation for classical pianists.	Tunes You've Always Wanted to Play, £14.95 Intermediate arrangements of well known classical tunes. A great variety of pieces to choose from. This is an essential book for any budding pianist, it will provide lots of great pieces for recitals and impromptu performances.	More Tunes You've Always Wanted to Play, £14.95 Part 2 of the same collection. Books such as these are great for sight-reading and performances. Well worth the investment!

Intermediate (Grades 4 - 6)


Erik Satie Piano works One of my favourite composers. These haunting pieces are not technically difficult to play, but require a great deal of musical expression. Excellent for students aged 13+ and adults.	Piano Tranquility A beautiful collection of mellow contemporary pieces by composers as diverse as Wim Mertens, Aphex Twin, Nitin Sawhney, Michael Nyman and David Gray. Pieces are of moderate difficulty. Suitable for teens and adults.	The Featured Pianist, £4.98 A collection of providing a superb enrichment to the intermediate pianist's repertoire. The accompanying CD contains professional performances of each piece and hints and tips.

Advanced (Grades 7 and beyond)


Edvard Grieg: Wedding Day At Troldhaugen, £3.75 A stunning solo piece taken from a large collection of beautiful pieces for piano solo, Grieg's Lyric Pieces.	The Best Of Olivier Messiaen In Thirteen Pieces For Piano, £20.95 13 of the best Piano works from the distinctive style of this 20th century French composer. Magical, mystical music with a dissonant yet spiritual sound. Have a listen to one of my favourite pieces from this book, La Colombe.	Fazil Say: Paganini Jazz, £7.50 This is an incredibly catch re-work of Paganini's famous Variations by the incredibl talented young Turkish composer, Fazil Say. Watch Fazil perform this piece on Youtube.


51 Piano Pieces From The Modern Repertoire , £12.95 Includes music by Albeniz, Debussy, De Falla, Faure, Griffes, Pinto, Stravinsky and Thuille. Some pieces are to be found in the standard repertoire for higher grades, but others are more pleasingly obscure yet still wonderful to play.	36 20th Century Piano Pieces, £10.95. This is a similar compilation but with lots of crowd-pleasing modern pieces specifically picked for recitals and festivals. Both compilations are very good value as modern music is often very expensive to purchase due to most of it still falling within copyright restrictions.	Anthology Of Piano Music Volume 3: The Romantic Period , £17.95. So much beautiful piano music and hardly enough years in our lifetime to learn it - but here's a good place to start. Romantic music represents some of the most lyrical piano music ever written and this book contains works by the great Romantic composers - Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, Faure, Brahms, Grieg, Mendelssohn and all the usual suspects!