About

Hi, my name is Jen and I’m a YouTuber and entrepreneur based out of Ontario, Canada! 

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When I was in primary and middle school, I took group piano lessons for about 6 years through a Royal Conservatory of Music piano teacher. I learned a whole lot of theory (so many workbooks) but didn’t really understand how to apply it to playing piano or writing my own music. At home, we had an upright Yamaha piano that I rarely practised because the piano was in the living room and everyone in the house could hear me stumble over sight reading and playing the same standard classical songs over and over again. 

 

In the back of my mind, I knew that it was possible to learn songs — especially pop songs — without full sheet music, and that there was some easy way to understand and remember how to play them. I had seen other people at school sit down at a piano and play song after song, but I could never figure out how they did it and was too shy to ask. 

 

During high school and university, I mostly stopped playing piano. But when I was in my mid-twenties, I wanted to starting playing again, so I bought myself an electric keyboard after I got my first real job and was living in my own apartment. Many years and many moves later, I still have that keyboard and it’s the one I use in my videos on YouTube.

 

Even though I hauled that keyboard around with me to a bunch of different apartments and houses, I didn’t play it very much because I was never very good at sight reading or keeping rhythm and didn’t like practising. And then a few years ago, I came across the concept of playing songs using lead sheets — simplified songs with just a melody line, chords, and lyrics — and improvising the left hand patterns. For the first time in my life, all the key signatures, scales, triads, and arpeggios that I had mindlessly learned and practised as a kid made sense and were actually useful!

 

Now, decades after taking formal lessons, I can finally sit down at the piano and teach myself how to play almost any pop song in about half an hour, as long as I know the key and basic chords. What I find most incredible is that it only took a few hours of reading about and understanding how lead sheets and left hand improvisation work to completely change the way I think about playing piano.

 

I’m still not very good at sight reading or playing classical music and would like to get better some day, but for now I’m happy to be tinkling away at the piano, learning to play some of my favourite K-pop and K-drama OST songs, creating my own lead sheets, and sharing them all with you!