Translator: Ryan Hildebrandt Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
I bet you one million dollars that you could learn piano
or, really, any skill in life.
Let me see a show of hands.
How many of you guys, at some point in your life,
have wanted to learn piano or some other musical instrument?
Alright, almost everybody, right?
And yet I still hear the comment so often
of people saying,
"Zach, you don't understand. I could never learn music,"
"See, Zach, you don't understand. My brain just doesn't work that way.
I don't have a knack for music,"
or "Zach, you don't understand.
I never took lessons as a kid, and I missed my window,
and now it's too late for me."
"Zach, you don't understand. I could never learn."
But I do understand
because I've taught hundreds of students piano,
and many who I've taught said those exact same comments.
What I do understand
is if you couldn't learn piano or some other skill in life,
it's likely you were simply taught in the wrong sequence.
And so whenever I hear these comments from people,
I proceed to teach them eight simple notes on piano.
That's it, eight notes.
I call it my secret sauce piano pattern,
and this one pattern
has completely redefined the way I look at teaching and learning
not just piano but, really, any skill in life.
And it's saved my music career three times.
But first things first: let me show you the pattern.
It's my favorite part of the presentation.
So for all my music theory nerds out there, like me,
this is a simple 9th chord arpeggio pattern.
But don't worry if you don't understand music theory;
you don't have to know music theory to be able to use the pattern.
Alright, so like I said, eight simple notes.
(Piano) One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight.
Because it's only eight notes long, you can learn it in two to three days,
and you could spend the rest of the week
speeding it up
so it sounds something like this.
(Gentle piano music)
But the big benefit to this specific series of eight notes
is because of the music theory behind it,
we can literally take this exact same pattern,
I can take my hand, I can lift it up,
and I could literally plop it down on any white note on the entire keyboard
and play the exact same pattern,
and it's always going to sound good.
So I could play it up here.
(High-pitched notes)
Or I could play the exact same pattern here.
(Low-pitched notes)
Or here.
Here.
(Gentle piano music)
It's not that you've just learned eight notes.
You haven't just learned eight notes;
I tricked you.
You've actually learned a ton of different patterns
up and down the entire piano keyboard.
What's even cooler about this specific pattern,
my favorite part,
is that this pattern is what's called "scalable,"
which means once you learn this one pattern,
you can literally scale it.
In other words, you can copy and paste the exact same pattern
underneath the melody of almost any song
in almost any genre,
and it's always going to make the song sound good.
Let me show you what I mean.
You could take the song "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,"
use the secret sauce pattern,
(Gentle piano music)
and it's going to sound like this.
(Gentle music: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot")
(Audience) Wow.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But it doesn't have to be that song - you can literally take any song.
We could take "Joy to the World,"
same pattern.
Sounds like this.
(Music: "Joy to the World")
You could take "Mary Had a Little Lamb,"
right, the most boring song in human history, on piano,
(Laughter)
and if you add in the secret sauce pattern,
it's going to sound cool.
So for this one,
first I'll show you the traditional way to learn "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
You've probably heard it before, sounds something like this.
(Stiff music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
Not exactly tearing up anybody in the audience, I hope.
(Laughter)
But if you take the exact same song, add the secret sauce pattern,
now it's going to sound like this.
(Flowing music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
And like I said, because of the properties of this pattern,
right, because I can play it anywhere because it makes everything sound cool,
not only is it motivating and inspiring to learn,
but it's literally saved my music career three times.
Now, the first time, I'm a sophomore in college.
My professor comes up to me, he's like,
"Zach, I heard from your friends that you play piano. Is this true?"
Now, the truth was, at this point, I'd been learning piano for two years
off of YouTube,
watching YouTube tutorials.
So I said, "Yeah, of course I play piano."
He said, "Great."
(Laughter)
Exactly.
He said, "Great.
My church in Fond du Lac is looking for a piano player.
The gig pays 50 bucks a week. Are you in?"
And all my little college brain in that moment could think of
was how many ramen noodles I could buy for 50 bucks a week.
(Laughter)
By the way, the math is 172 packages, if you're curious.
(Laughter)
And so now I was excited.
I get to play piano, do what I love, and actually make money off of it.
How cool is that?
But my excitement quickly turned to fear
because my professor sent me the music I was supposed to learn.
It was all in sheet music form.
Now remember, I was learning off YouTube.
So I literally did not know how to read sheet music.
So I start freaking out.
You know, I'm like, "I'll be sitting down at the piano at church.
Everybody's going to be looking at me.
It's going to be embarrassing.
I hope they forgive me."
But then I realized, "Zach, you got the secret sauce pattern.
This thing works on everything."
And I literally played the entire church service
using one left-hand pattern underneath songs
like "Christ the Lord Has Risen Today."
(Gentle music: "Christ the Lord Has Risen Today")
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And then I played "Oh Come All Ye Faithful."
(Gentle music: "Oh Come All Ye Faithful")
And I literally played the entire church service
using one left-hand pattern.
And I remember I was kind of scared because I was like,
"What if they figure out I'm using the same thing on everything?
And people came up to me after church, and they said,
"Zach, we loved the way you played.
We loved your original renditions of all the songs."
(Laughter)
It was great, it was great.
At that moment, believe it or not, that moment in church
is the moment that gave me the confidence and the motivation
to switch my major from math, at the time, which I hated,
and switch my major to music, which I was passionate about.
But that's when I hit a brick wall because I didn't realize
all the other music majors had 13 years of piano experience.
They started off in kindergarten.
They played for 13 years through their senior year of high school,
and now they're a music major.
And I was coming in, like,
"Hey guys, two years off of YouTube. What do you think?"
(Laughter)
And at first I thought it was a curse.
I thought, "Think how good I'd be if I had 13 years of piano experience."
But later on I realized it was a blessing
because in those two years that I was teaching myself piano, right?
I was going on YouTube and looking up tutorials.
I was on Google typing in "efficient piano practice strategies."
Right? I was even on these underground, nerdy piano forums,
where I'd be like,
"Hey, does anybody have the fingering for the B flat harmonic minor scale?"
People from all over the world would message me
with how they solved their specific problem on piano,
and I would try stuff, and I would just figure it out.
So now I like to say I got lucky
because I really lucked into this perfect-storm situation,
where in one hand I had Dr. Eli Kalman, a world-renowned piano teacher,
teaching me the fundamental, traditional way to learn piano,
but on the other hand,
I still had this kind of rogue, rag-tag, tried-and-figured-out approach
that I'd learned off of YouTube.
And when you combine these two ways to learn,
it leads to an extremely fast and extremely powerful form of learning.
It's how I developed my method for learning,
and later on, teaching piano.
It's how I graduated as one of the top students in the music program.
And this leads me to the second time
that the secret sauce pattern changed my music career.
That's when I moved to Nashville, Tennessee,
and I started teaching piano lessons.
And very early on, I developed a reputation
as someone who could help you learn faster,
someone who could really 80/20 rule your practicing,
narrowing down what's efficient and what's working,
and help get you there faster.
But I had one big problem.
My big problem was adult students.
And not for the reason, by the way, that everybody always says.
Not because adults' brains learn slower
or "Kids' brains are like sponges,
and adults' brains can't soak up information."
None of that was true.
In fact, my adults that actually practiced learned faster than my kids - right? -
because I didn't have to make everything into a fun game for them.
They would just practice, and I could just tell them what to do.
(Laughter)
But the problem was I could not get 90% of my adult students
to just sit down at the piano and actually practice.
So as I was going through my notes and trying to figure out why some people
have become consistent practicers and lifelong learners and other's don't,
I'm going through my notes, and a pattern starts to emerge.
I start to figure out something that I now call the launch point.
Now, the launch point
is a point about 90 days, three months, into learning,
and if I can get an adult student to practice consistently for 90 days,
something starts to click, and they hit this launch point
because once something starts to click and they start getting these results,
they start feeling more motivated.
Once they feel motivated, they practice more.
Once they practice, they get more results.
Once they get results, they get more motivation,
and it leads to this upward, positive, motivational loop.
But if I can't get somebody to this 90-day launch point,
oftentimes they quit piano and never take music lessons again.
So at this point it became my goal - my mission, really -
to get as many of these adult students to this 90-day launch point
as humanly possible.
And I tried a lot of different motivational strategies.
I tried doing practice charts.
I tried giving people discounts on lessons.
I tried being the annoying texting person,
like, "Hey, did you practice today?
Maybe sit down at the old piano, start practicing."
And yet nothing was working.
I'm scratching my head and thinking,
"How can I get these people to practice?"
So I start thinking back:
"Okay, Zach, how'd you get yourself to practice
back when you were just some dude learning off YouTube?"
And that's when it hit me.
It was the secret sauce pattern all along.
Because once I could play the secret sauce pattern,
I could play songs I was passionate about.
I could play for my friends, my family and church.
They'd say, "Wow, you can play piano!"
That's what got me motivated.
That's what got me excited to practice.
Now, the traditional way of teaching piano
or, really, any skill in life
is what do you learn first?
You learn the boring but important fundamentals, right?
And then months, maybe even years, later,
now you get to learn the fun stuff.
But I thought, "Okay, what if we flip that equation on its head a bit?
What if we teach a bit of the fun stuff first?
Get people excited, get them motivated,
and then we can go back and we can teach the boring but important fundamentals.
So I started teaching the secret sauce pattern early on
to adult students.
And it worked.
Suddenly, adults would come into lessons, they'd say,
"Zach, I played the pattern for my niece. She loved it."
The next question is the important part.
They'd ask me, "But I don't understand.
Why do these series of eight notes always work
no matter where you play them on the keyboard?"
You know what they were asking me?
They were asking me to teach them the music theory behind the pattern,
the boring fundamentals that I used to have to force-feed to people,
they were excited about it,
and it made my job as a teacher and their job as a student
a hundred times easier.
And this leads me to the third time
that the secret sauce pattern completely changed my music career.
That's when I thought, "Secret sauce thing's working.
You know, I'd learned off of YouTube way back in the day.
Why couldn't anybody learn off YouTube?"
So I hopped over to Best Buy, got one of those little flip cams -
you know, this was before the day of smartphones -
put it up on the tripod and recorded a video lesson
detailing exactly how to do the secret sauce pattern.
I put it up on YouTube.
I forgot about it for two to three months.
And I remember I checked back later, two to three months later,
and I couldn't believe it,
because the video had hundreds of thousands of views.
I remember I thought it was a glitch.
I'm like refreshing the page.
I called my mom, like, "Mom, check your computer.
How many views does it say on your screen? Really? 100,000?"
What was more exciting to me than the views
was the comments I was getting
because I was getting:
"Zach, I learned this thing in two days."
"Zach, this motivated me to play piano again."
"Can you upload more of these tutorials?"
So I continued to upload more and more of these videos to YouTube
until nowadays I actually make a living teaching piano on YouTube.
And again, I feel like I fell into this very lucky and unique situation
where on one hand I had to learn
how to teach and motivate people in person, face-to-face,
but then I also had to learn,
How do we transition that teaching into online video content
and have it still work?
As you probably already know,
with the bigger the internet gets,
the more technology we have,
the more of teaching and learning is going to be done online through video content.
You've probably already learned something off of YouTube,
off of Google, off an online course,
and as we move into this new age of online learning,
there's a lot of lessons that I learned along the way
when I had to transfer my material.
But the biggest lesson, by far the biggest lesson,
is that information is no longer the issue.
We're still treating it like it is.
Information used to be the bottleneck.
You'd go to a class because what?
You need the information from the teacher.
We'd open up a book because you need the information from the book.
But nowadays, I mean,
whether you want to learn ballroom dancing,
whether you want to learn Spanish, piano,
all the information you need is right there at your fingertips
on Google and Facebook and YouTube and online courses
and forums and blog posts.
Information is no longer the issue.
So what's the issue now?
Well, as you probably already know, the issue is motivation.
The issue is getting someone to take out Spanish flash cards
and actually start studying.
The issue is getting somebody to go to the gym.
The issue is getting someone to sit down at the piano and actually practice,
and in this new age of learning,
we need to start prioritizing motivation over information.
And the first step to doing that
is to finding the secret sauce in whatever you're learning
or whatever you're teaching.
Find something early on in the learning process
that's easy enough for a beginner to learn
but still cool and exciting enough to get someone motivated,
get them inspired, get them confident.
And not just for piano.
If you're teaching somebody how to cook,
don't start off with the fundamentals of cooking.
Right? First find that recipe that's three ingredients,
but when you pull it out of the oven,
it looks like it came from a five-star restaurant.
One they can feed their friends and family
who will say, "Woah. You cooked this?
When did you learn to cook? Can you teach me?"
Get them excited.
Give them the motivation first, and then give them the information.
Find the secret sauce to whatever you're learning
or whatever you're teaching.
And by the way,
once you do find the secret sauce,
make sure you shoot me an email, let me know what it is,
and then I'll send you my address,
and I'll be waiting on my million-dollar check.
Thank you guys very much.
(Applause)