We learned this the slow way.
Years of videos, articles and half-finished courses, picked up in no particular order. It worked eventually. It should not have taken that long.
Who we are
A few musicians who got tired of starting over
We are a small group of players — piano and guitar, mostly self-taught, all of us at different levels. None of us learned in a conservatory. We learned the way most people do now: a video here, an article there, a course started and abandoned around week three.
Between us we have spent an unreasonable number of hours on that approach. It does eventually work. What it mostly produces along the way is the feeling that you are not quite clever enough for this, which is both wrong and very effective at making people stop.
Keys n Dots is our attempt to lay out what we wish someone had handed us at the start.
The problem
Everything is available. Nothing is in order.
There has never been more free music education, and it has never been harder to learn from. Each video is fine. Each article is fine. But they were made independently, so every one of them assumes a different starting point.
You watch something on chord progressions that assumes you know intervals. You read about intervals and it assumes you can read a staff. You go looking for that and land somewhere that opens with the circle of fifths.
It is almost never that the material is too hard. It is that it arrived in the wrong order, and nobody said so.
So every lesson here states what it assumes and links back to it. If you land somewhere and feel lost, that is a defect in the page rather than in you, and there should always be a link taking you one step back. That is what the music theory path is.
The other half of it
Structure is one problem. Showing up is the other.
The second thing we got wrong for years was treating practice as something you do when you feel like it. Long sessions, weeks apart, each one starting from cold.
Ten minutes on a Tuesday, every Tuesday, will take you further in six months than three hours whenever the mood strikes. That is not motivational advice — it is just how skills that depend on recognition actually build.
One lesson a week
That is what Tuesdays are for
One idea, about ten minutes, plus the exercise that makes it stick. The lesson is in the email — you do not have to click through to get the point.
How this site is written
Five rules we hold ourselves to
Order over coverage
A shorter path that builds correctly beats an exhaustive reference you cannot enter.
Explain why, not just what
Anything you memorise without understanding, you will forget. The reasoning is the lesson.
Say when it is hard
Barre chords hurt. Hands together is genuinely difficult. Pretending otherwise makes people think the problem is them.
Show it, do not only describe it
Diagrams and working tools, not walls of prose. If something can be clicked, it should be.
Free, and no wall
Every lesson and every tool works without an account. Nothing is held back to collect an email address.
Being straight with you
What you will not find here
Sheet music for songs
Published songs are copyrighted. We do not host tabs or notation for them, and we do not link to sites that do it without a licence.
Gear reviews — for now
If that changes, affiliate links will be labelled plainly at the top of the page, not buried in a footer.
A shortcut
Theory speeds up learning. It does not replace the hours. Nobody here will tell you otherwise.
Video courses
Reading and doing, at your own pace. There is plenty of good video elsewhere and we will not pretend to compete with it.
Corrections and questions
Tell us if something is wrong
Music theory has a lot of edge cases and this site is written by a small number of people — mistakes will happen. If you find one, or a page does not make sense, say so and it gets fixed.
We read everything. Corrections get priority, and the page gets updated rather than argued about.