Piano by Numbers: The Complete Method

You have five fingers, and they are numbered one to five. That is the whole alphabet.

Most piano methods ask you to learn a second language before you are allowed to play a single song. Five lines, four spaces, sharps, flats, and a year of patience. Piano by Numbers takes the other road. Instead of notation, every piece is printed as finger numbers over a picture of the keyboard, so you can see exactly where the hand goes and what it plays. Most people are playing a real tune inside the first twenty minutes.

This is the complete method, both levels, rebuilt page for page in 2026.

Level 1, fifty pages. Getting to know the keyboard, finding middle C, the right hand one finger at a time, then the left hand, then both hands together. You finish it playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, Ode to Joy, Jingle Bells, Aura Lee and Lightly Row.

Level 2, forty seven pages. Three counts in a bar, faster notes, the fermata, new positions for both hands, sharps and flats, and playing softly and loudly. Its pieces include We Three Kings, Row Your Boat, This Old Man, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Happy Birthday, Amazing Grace, Battle Hymn of the Republic and My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.

The bonus book, Ten Classical Pieces, seventeen pages. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Haydn, Rossini, Dvorak, Handel, Grieg and Vivaldi, all in the same notation. Proof that the method does not stop at nursery rhymes.

Ninety three printable practice sheets. Every exercise and every piece on its own page, so you can put one sheet on the music stand instead of the whole book.

And the Play Along. Thirty seven of the pieces, recorded, in a player that runs on your own computer with no internet. The key that is sounding lights up with the finger number printed on it, and a bracket above the keyboard shows which five keys your hand is covering and slides when the hand has to move. Slow it down while you learn, loop one line until it is yours.

Everything downloads straight away. Print what you like, keep it forever.

By David Yzhaki and Ido Ronen, from piano-play-it.com, where two hundred and seventeen free video lessons have been taught since 2008.