As part of our ongoing effort to teach and impart our love of music to others, we sometimes apprentice new instructors through our apprenticeship program. We call them Apprentice Instructors. Our goal is to provide them with teaching experience and give new students an opportunity to take lessons at a discounted rate. As part of our program, the instructor works closely with a current piano instructor and meets with studio owner Joey on a monthly basis. The goal of these meetings are to review each student’s lessons, to ensure that the student is advancing in the learning process, and to ensure that the instructor is doing a good job of inspiring and connecting with the student.
August 5, 2016 4 Comments
January 4, 2013 Leave a Comment
Stop Practicing That Mistake! – Advice for working through difficult passages
Everyday, our bodies use this cool thing called muscle memory. It’s the automatic reaction that your body learns after doing something so many times (like always grabbing your toothbrush with your right hand and the toothpaste with your left). Half the time you probably don’t even realize that your muscles have learned this little trick, but it’s very blatant once you try to perform the learned pattern differently.
When you are practicing the piano, muscle memory is incredibly useful and helpful – unless you use it wrong. Example: Say you’re playing Fur Elise. Frankly you play fantastically, however at the beginning of the third line is an impossible jumble of notes and accidentals that you can never quite get right. Being the perfectionist that you are you immediately stop and replay that chord until you finally get it aaaaaand continue with your masterpiece! Voila! Fantastic! If you continue this pattern you surely will get that nasty chord the first time eventually…right? Wrong! See even though your brain eventually will learn those note names perfectly, your muscles have memorized the pattern of stopping and replaying, stopping and replaying. Thus you’re actually practicing messing up even while you’re trying to fix messing up!
November 20, 2012 Leave a Comment
One Time, I Killed My Piano Teacher
by: Alex Lee
One time, I killed my piano teacher.
I didn’t realize it till years later, but it’s true. She was mean and unhappy and wanted to make sure I was unhappy too. She succeeded. I remember one lesson she made me play the B scale for 30 minutes because after 4 weeks I still had no idea which keys to press. She gave me the silent treatment, and I tried not to cry the whole time. Shortly thereafter, a younger version of me prayed to God that she (insert little kid voice with a sniffle) “Would never have to deal with Mrs. Moody ever ever ever again.”