Best piano learning resources for intermediate players

Adult Piano Adventures Book 2 is $24.99, the RCM Celebration Series is $21.95 to $26.95, and Hanon and Czerny are free on IMSLP. tonebase is $359 a year, Pianote is $229 a year, and a private lesson averages $87 an hour. A Chopin Left Hand study edition is $9, with Chopin’s right hand over one named chord per harmony.

Method books after the beginner books

Adult Piano Adventures All-in-One Course Book 2 by Nancy and Randall Faber is $24.99 for 200 pages, and it adds triad inversions, 3/8 and 6/8 time, sixteenth notes, connected pedaling and the major and minor scales. Lead sheets of familiar songs teach chord playing, and the video lessons and backing tracks are online.

Alfred’s Basic Adult All-in-One Course Book 2 is $19.99 and Book 3 is $24.99, each 144 comb-bound pages by Willard Palmer, Morton Manus and Amanda Vick Lethco with the theory written into the lesson pages. Book 3 carries 45 songs across folk, classical and contemporary styles, and every piece is recorded on the CD.

Hal Leonard’s Adult Piano Method Book 2 is $19.99, by Fred Kern, Barbara Kreader, Phillip Keveren and Mona Rejino, and it runs from five-finger patterns to the scales of C, G and F, with over 150 backing tracks online.

Graded repertoire

The Royal Conservatory’s Celebration Series, Sixth Edition of 2022, puts 22 pieces from four eras in each Piano Repertoire book with recordings online, and Level 5 is $21.95 and Level 8 is $26.95. Level 5 already holds Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. ABRSM’s Piano Exam Pieces 2025 & 2026 do the same job for the British grades at £14.95 a grade, nine pieces each, three from each of lists A, B and C.

Denes Agay’s Classics to Moderns, Intermediate Grades, is $16.99 for 160 pages of Baroque to modern pieces in their original form.

Jane Magrath’s Masterwork Classics, Levels 5 to 8 from Alfred at $10.99 to $12.99 a book, holds the standard teaching pieces at each level, with 25 recordings by Valery Lloyd-Watts online for Level 5.

Technique

Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist, 60 exercises first published in 1873, and Czerny’s School of Velocity, Op. 299, 40 studies from the 1830s, are both public domain and free as PDF scans on IMSLP. Dohnányi’s Essential Finger Exercises of 1929 is on IMSLP too, marked public domain in the US and still under copyright in the EU.

Sight-reading

Piano Marvel’s SASR is free with an account, and it pulls excerpts from thousands of pieces across 90 sublevels to give you a score from 100 to 1900, one level per 100 points. Players have taken over 1.5 million tests, and the average score is 405.

Paul Harris’s Improve your sight-reading! Piano Grade 5 from Faber Music is £8.99 for rhythmic and melodic exercises, prepared pieces with questions and graded sight-reading pieces, with audio online to check yourself against.

Sight Reading Factory is $45 a year for unlimited generated exercises at a level you set, with playback at any tempo and a practice log, so you never read the same line twice.

Courses with real teachers

tonebase is $59 a month, $359 a year or $895 for life, with over 1,000 lessons from Garrick Ohlsson, Seymour Bernstein, Emanuel Ax and John O’Conor, weekly live workshops and a 14-day free trial.

Pianote is $25 a month or $229 a year for lessons only and $30 or $279 with its 950-plus songs, with direct access to real teachers, weekly live Q&As, a 7-day trial and a 90-day guarantee. Its YouTube channel is the biggest of these at about 2.3 million subscribers.

ArtistWorks’ classical piano school with Christie Peery is $19.99 a month, or $29.99 for unlimited Video Exchanges, where you upload a performance and she answers with a recorded video of tips. The course runs 380 lessons across 32 levels, and every past exchange since 2009 is in the library to watch.

YouTube

Sonata Secrets is Henrik Kilhamn, a Gothenburg pianist with two degrees from the Academy of Music and Drama, playing and analyzing the repertoire in over 200 videos for over 65,000 subscribers since 2019.

Nahre Sol, a Juilliard graduate, had about 827,000 subscribers in March 2026 for videos on composition, practice and music education, including her Practice Notes series.

Josh Wright, a Doctor of Musical Arts from Michigan and a 2019 Steinway Teacher Hall of Fame inductee, gives his free lessons on YouTube and his full course as ProPractice. That course is 500-plus tutorials in four levels from early beginner to advanced, $797 for life with a 30-day guarantee.

Theory and apps

musictheory.net’s lessons are free and run from the staff to roman numeral analysis, chord progressions and Neapolitan chords, ending with an analysis of the Moonlight Sonata, and Tenuto puts the drills on iPhone and iPad for $4.99. Open Music Theory is a free textbook under a Creative Commons license, and Version 2, edited by Mark Gotham and six others, covers fundamentals, diatonic and chromatic harmony and form.

The apps that grade your playing are compared in best piano apps for intermediate adults, and the theory apps and books in best music theory apps and books for classical pianists.

A teacher

MTNA, founded in 1876 with about 17,000 members, runs a Find a Teacher search by zip code within 5, 10 or 20 miles, filtered by instrument and by whether the teacher works online. Ensemble Schools’ 2026 guide puts a 60-minute private lesson at $87 on average across the US, from $73 in Tacoma to $98 in Chicago.

Study editions

A Chopin Left Hand edition is a PDF of one piece. The right hand is exactly as Chopin wrote it, taken from a public-domain engraving and checked against the edition text, over one root-position chord per harmony. The chords are named above the staff (B, F♯⁷, C♯m, E♯°⁷) and numbered below (I, V⁷, vii°⁷/V, Ger⁺⁶), and boxed section letters mark the form. A one-page analysis at the end explains the notable chords, the form, and why the piece ends the way it does. I learned Op. 9 No. 2 from this edition, with Chopin’s right hand from the first day.

Chopin for intermediate and returning adults lists twelve pieces in order from the E minor prelude to the Fantaisie-Impromptu, and which Chopin nocturne to learn first explains why Op. 32 No. 1 comes before Op. 9 No. 2.