Teaching

Did you learn to read before you could speak?

Imagine you wanted to learn French. You go to a teacher and in the first lesson they teach you how to pronounce the letters. In the second lesson they give you a French nursery rhyme to read out, and eventually you can recite poems by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, etc. without knowing how to ask the way to the nearest train station.

That is how music is usually taught.

You're taught how to read music first, and then are then given progressively more difficult pieces to learn without knowing why they sound the way they do. The result is that you might be able to play a few party pieces but if someone sings you a simple melody you can't play it back to them.

Music is a language. Jazz musicians are fluent in music. A good jazz pianist listens to what his saxophonist is playing, works out what the notes are, composes a response in his head, and then plays it in real time. That's what it means to speak music, but it isn't limited to jazz.

So, here's how my lessons work: you bring a list of the 10+ songs you're most crazy about to the first lesson, and I'll listen to them and work out how to teach you to play them by ear. I'll do this by recording MP3's of the melodies that I'll give you to take away and transcribe, and later we'll add bass notes and chords. Each week I'll also give you video notes showing which parts to practice. This way you'll be developing your hearing all the time as well as your playing, and you'll think about music in terms of the keyboard rather than in terms of a piece of paper. Plus you'll be playing music you love right from the start so that you'll develop your own sound as quickly as possible.

A word of warning, though: to be a good musician takes years of full-time training and you can't avoid that - anyone who tells you otherwise is lying in order to get your money. However, the teaching techniques I've developed will help you progress faster than via the conventional route, and so long as you're enjoying each step of the way time won't be an issue.