Motor skills underlie much of what we do, yet how the brain underlies their acquisition and execution remains poorly understood. We address this question in rodents using a fully automated training system that can be combined with chronic electrophysiology, high-resolution behavioral monitoring, and targeted circuit manipulations. In my talk I will focus on a motor skill learning paradigm that trains highly precise and complex motor sequences in rats. I will show that motor cortex is essential for acquiring the skills we train, but dispensable for executing them once they have been learned. These results dissociate motor cortex’s role in skill learning from its role in control, and suggest that motor cortex serves as a “tutor” for subcortical motor circuits during skill learning, allowing these phylogenetically older control circuits to autonomously store and execute novel task-specific motor sequences.