If you can talk, you can improvise.

Many talented musicians spend years storing other people’s music between their ears. But when they finish their repertoire or can’t get a tough sequence just right, they’re helpless. Party’s over. The piano is suddenly a grinning stranger.

Because they were taught that music is composed by geniuses, and the rest of us are lucky if we can repeat them without stuttering.

Guess what?

We’re not all Shakespeare, but we all talk.

A musician who "can’t" improvise is like a second-grader who can recite Hamlet, Hiawatha, and Huckleberry Finn verbatim but is afraid to ask you to pass the mustard.

Come on. Wouldn’t it be great if you could play loud when you felt loud, sad when you felt sad, without hunting down someone else’s sheet music? It’s a simple question of learning to talk. Come and learn the basics of musical grammar. It’s called music theory. Don’t cringe—-music theory is easier and more coherent than English grammar. And three-year-olds have that down.

You’ll watch me use music theory to make basic songs soar (think "Mary Had a Little Lamb"). Then you’ll come up and play along yourself. By the end of the course, you might not be ready to quit your day job, but you’ll know enough to get better at improvising for the rest of your life.

I expect you to be comfortable playing the piano with both hands and know the names of the keys, but that’s it. That’s all the alphabet you need to learn to speak music.

You’ll be thrilled not only that you can improvise, but also at the simple structure beneath most songs you already play…and how easy it is to have fun with them.

Let’s learn the language of music. You don’t have to be Mozart to speak your mind.