Piano Lessons
In my opinion, very few things can offer a life-long love of music, joy in continuous learning, and peace in life than being able to sit at the piano and wash away any bad moods and create new and happy moods the way a piano can.
99.9% of people who want to learn piano want to do so for enjoyment. That’s it. They don’t want to practice for hour upon hour, months and years, practice session after practice session…, and then maybe just maybe be good enough one day to finally play a song they have wanted to play for the sheer joy of actually playing the song. They want to simply learn to play the songs they know and love for themselves, their family and friends, and they want to learn to do it quickly.
The problem always has been the methods of teaching that people often use. If you want to be, or want your child to be a classically trained pianist…if you want to spend hours upon hours practicing what many see as mundane and difficult techniques to become that classically trained pianist, with rigid methods, strict teaching processes, hours upon hours doing the same exercises over and over and such, for years, then I am not the teacher you want. If you want to be or want your child to be a member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, or the next Mozart, then I am also not the teacher you want to choose.
I need to be as clear as
possible. I DO NOT TEACH
CLASSICAL PIANO! Classical piano is a
different universe from non-classical.
If you want to play classical piano, it is very difficult, and it will take
YEARS to learn. If you are in that 1/10th
of 1% that wants to become the next concert pianist, I applaud your choice and
wish you every success possible.
The rules of classical piano playing do not apply to modern and contemporary music, and vice versa. They are two different worlds. Piano teachers are some of the kindest and warmest and best people out there, but most piano teachers are not professional piano players, and most professional piano players are not teachers.
HOWEVER, & MOST IMPORTANTLY!! If you want to or want your
child to develop an overwhelming lifelong love of the piano for all the pure
joy it provides, if you want to learn to play the piano quickly while you’re actually playing INSTEAD of practicing mundane hand maneuvers, and
if you want all the happiness and
hours of meditative and peaceful feelings and romance for life that playing
piano can provide, well then, I humbly suggest you choose me to be your
teacher. If you want to learn quickly,
within weeks and months, not years and years, then I would choose me.
Living in or near New Orleans, we live in one of the most musical places in the world. If you ask any one of the piano players you see in the French Quarter or other local venues if they were classically trained, you will find that the overwhelming majority were not. They learned the way that I intend to teach you if you so choose.
There will be practice, but it won’t be that drawn out and strict level of practice. It will be exercises built for enjoyment and an ever growing love of the piano. You will be simply amazed at how fast you learn and how skilled you will become. I will teach you to read music in a way that takes all the complications out of it, enabling you or your child to focus simply on the joy of playing music, which, isn’t that what it’s all about anyway?
To quote the PBS personality “Scott the Piano Guy”…
“…look at the sport of basketball. When all is said and done, what is fun about playing basketball? Shooting a basket, right? Well, what if when we started kids playing basketball we told them that for the first year they were going to have to do nothing but dribbling and defensive drills? Then in the second year, they could only work on memorizing plays. Only after all of that will they be allowed to begin to start shooting at the hoop. How many kids do you think would make it through the first two years still interested in playing? Not many, that’s for sure. Now I grant that the ones that were bull-headed enough to stick it out would certainly have a quality, firm grasp of the fundamentals and would probably go on to become good players. The other 99%, however, would be forever cheated out of the opportunity to get the simple enjoyment of going out and shooting some baskets…….
…jump to playing piano, and you find much the same thing. You start taking classical lessons once a week. (By the way, more than likely, you were never even asked what type of music YOU were interested in playing. You just get started on Book 1 of whatever method your teacher uses just like all the rest of his/her students.) For months and months you work on scales, arpeggios, fingering, notation reading, and whatever else. After LITERALLY MULTIPLE YEARS OF WORK, you will finally get to a point where you are playing something enjoyable rather than another rendition of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” or some other beginning level tune….
….the overwhelming majority of students NEVER get to this level of proficiency, and they bail out. Too time consuming, too expensive, not enough fun, see ya later….the 97% who quit, just like in the basketball example, are now going to be robbed of the opportunity to experience one of the most enjoyable things in the world—making music…..why? Because as far as they’re concerned, the piano lessons didn’t work….All their experience taught them is that playing piano equaled going and taking lessons once a week ad infinitum and so they failed….”
Make sense? It sure does to me!
With my method of teaching, you
or your child will be playing simple melodies, melodies YOU choose, within
days or weeks, and moving toward a higher level soon after that. You will be amazed at how quickly one can
learn the piano when all the often rigid barriers to learning have been removed.
I teach my non-traditional method utilizing simple procedures to learn piano chords and their branches, along with the chording of melodies as well as other piano methods that will have you or your child being able to grasp the piano in hardly any time at all. All the notes, all the sounds, all the beauty of any song will be within your reach. Will you or they become the next Beethoven? Maybe. Maybe not. But I do promise you that if you want to learn for the reasons of enjoyment, lifelong learning, peace, happiness, joy and spirituality, and if you want to build these things into your life for the course of your life or your child’s life, then I truly suggest my method of piano teaching. I have seen the piano take hold of someone’s life and never let go. And that’s an amazing and wonderful thing.
You will save lots of money because my methods take far less time to
teach and learn than classical training.
You will learn songs that YOU WANT TO LEARN AND PLAY, not songs you have
to “get through” to move on to the next level, not boring exercises that often
take the joy from playing. Your children will learn songs that THEY WANT TO
LEARN AND PLAY, right away.
Often immediately! They will learn to
play the songs that they have chosen, not some 250 year old song written long
ago that they’re not interested in learning.
There's nothing wrong with those songs, but you or your children get to choose the music and the songs, and you get to learn
FROM THOSE SONGS as well! I have found that one
learns piano the best not by doing boring exercises over and over, but by
PLAYING SONGS YOU LOVE. Songs YOU love,
not the songs “assigned” by the teacher. In this way, each individual's inspiration can break free!
You or your child can learn the
piano more quickly than you ever thought possible. You can provide yourself or your children a
lifelong love of piano and music. Again,
most of us in all reality aren’t going to be Mozart. If that’s the goal, I’m not you or your
child’s teacher, and I will be very willing to help you find a suitable teacher
for that goal. Classically trained
pianists are some of the most talented, most patient, hardest working and
musically gifted people in the world.
MOST IMPORTANTLY! If you are seeking for you
or your child the ability to play the piano for the sheer and wonderful joy of
it, to learn it quickly, to establish a lifelong love of music with all the gifts,
happiness, rewards and romance it can offer us in life, and the ability to
experience those things RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, then I humbly suggest you give me a call. I can help make this happen for you or your child.
I consider playing the piano as one of the greatest joys and privileges of my life, and I would love to share that happiness by teaching you or your loved one how to play the piano and for you to discover that joy and happiness too.
Tweets by @88KeysToTickle
If you are a
person who has always wanted to learn how to play the piano and thought it was
too difficult, or, if you want your children to learn how to play piano as a lifetime interest for pure enjoyment and happiness verses the sometimes often difficult
and rigid methods taught by some of today’s piano teachers, then I can help
you.
In my opinion, very few things can offer a life-long love of music, joy in continuous learning, and peace in life than being able to sit at the piano and wash away any bad moods and create new and happy moods the way a piano can.
99.9% of people who want to learn piano want to do so for enjoyment. That’s it. They don’t want to practice for hour upon hour, months and years, practice session after practice session…, and then maybe just maybe be good enough one day to finally play a song they have wanted to play for the sheer joy of actually playing the song. They want to simply learn to play the songs they know and love for themselves, their family and friends, and they want to learn to do it quickly.
The problem always has been the methods of teaching that people often use. If you want to be, or want your child to be a classically trained pianist…if you want to spend hours upon hours practicing what many see as mundane and difficult techniques to become that classically trained pianist, with rigid methods, strict teaching processes, hours upon hours doing the same exercises over and over and such, for years, then I am not the teacher you want. If you want to be or want your child to be a member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, or the next Mozart, then I am also not the teacher you want to choose.The rules of classical piano playing do not apply to modern and contemporary music, and vice versa. They are two different worlds. Piano teachers are some of the kindest and warmest and best people out there, but most piano teachers are not professional piano players, and most professional piano players are not teachers.
There will be practice, but it won’t be that drawn out and strict level of practice. It will be exercises built for enjoyment and an ever growing love of the piano. You will be simply amazed at how fast you learn and how skilled you will become. I will teach you to read music in a way that takes all the complications out of it, enabling you or your child to focus simply on the joy of playing music, which, isn’t that what it’s all about anyway?
To quote the PBS personality “Scott the Piano Guy”…
“…look at the sport of basketball. When all is said and done, what is fun about playing basketball? Shooting a basket, right? Well, what if when we started kids playing basketball we told them that for the first year they were going to have to do nothing but dribbling and defensive drills? Then in the second year, they could only work on memorizing plays. Only after all of that will they be allowed to begin to start shooting at the hoop. How many kids do you think would make it through the first two years still interested in playing? Not many, that’s for sure. Now I grant that the ones that were bull-headed enough to stick it out would certainly have a quality, firm grasp of the fundamentals and would probably go on to become good players. The other 99%, however, would be forever cheated out of the opportunity to get the simple enjoyment of going out and shooting some baskets…….
…jump to playing piano, and you find much the same thing. You start taking classical lessons once a week. (By the way, more than likely, you were never even asked what type of music YOU were interested in playing. You just get started on Book 1 of whatever method your teacher uses just like all the rest of his/her students.) For months and months you work on scales, arpeggios, fingering, notation reading, and whatever else. After LITERALLY MULTIPLE YEARS OF WORK, you will finally get to a point where you are playing something enjoyable rather than another rendition of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” or some other beginning level tune….
….the overwhelming majority of students NEVER get to this level of proficiency, and they bail out. Too time consuming, too expensive, not enough fun, see ya later….the 97% who quit, just like in the basketball example, are now going to be robbed of the opportunity to experience one of the most enjoyable things in the world—making music…..why? Because as far as they’re concerned, the piano lessons didn’t work….All their experience taught them is that playing piano equaled going and taking lessons once a week ad infinitum and so they failed….”
Make sense? It sure does to me!
I teach my non-traditional method utilizing simple procedures to learn piano chords and their branches, along with the chording of melodies as well as other piano methods that will have you or your child being able to grasp the piano in hardly any time at all. All the notes, all the sounds, all the beauty of any song will be within your reach. Will you or they become the next Beethoven? Maybe. Maybe not. But I do promise you that if you want to learn for the reasons of enjoyment, lifelong learning, peace, happiness, joy and spirituality, and if you want to build these things into your life for the course of your life or your child’s life, then I truly suggest my method of piano teaching. I have seen the piano take hold of someone’s life and never let go. And that’s an amazing and wonderful thing.
_______________________________________________________
Piano Teaching/Lesson Fees
I will come to your home to
teach. The fees are very affordable at
$140/month**, paid in full at the beginning of each month. There is one lesson per week for 45 minutes
each week, totaling four lessons a month. I also offer 30 minute lesson plans as well. (see examples below.)
Some students want to quicken
the pace of learning so they have two lessons each week, totaling 8 lessons a month. I offer discounts on those plans. Instead of $280/month for the 8 lessons, it is $250/month, paid
in full at the beginning of each month, providing two lessons each week, totaling a full hour and a half
of instruction each week. This discount also applies to the 30 minute plans. (see examples below.)
Rate Plan Examples:
One 45 minute lesson per week making 4 lessons/month = $140/month
Two 45 minute lessons per week making 8 lessons/month = $250/month
One 30 minute lesson per week making 4 lessons/month = $100/month
Two 30 minute lessons per week making 8 lessons/month = $190/month
If you would like to learn and set the lessons up at an even faster pace, the fee is $25 per each 45 minute lesson beyond any of the plans.
Rate Plan Examples:
One 45 minute lesson per week making 4 lessons/month = $140/month
Two 45 minute lessons per week making 8 lessons/month = $250/month
One 30 minute lesson per week making 4 lessons/month = $100/month
Two 30 minute lessons per week making 8 lessons/month = $190/month
If you would like to learn and set the lessons up at an even faster pace, the fee is $25 per each 45 minute lesson beyond any of the plans.
**Some
travel fees may not be included:
· If you live on the Northshore of New Orleans,
there is no travel fee.
· If you live in New Orleans or Metairie, the
travel fee is an additional $10 per lesson.
· If you live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the
travel fee is an additional $15 per lesson.
Since there are only so many
timeslots to go around and other students may want an open slot that isn’t
available, I am unable to refund any portions of the fees whether you take the
lesson or not. If something happens where
I myself cannot provide the lesson for any reason whatsoever, that lesson can
be deducted from the next month’s fee.
Phone: 812-697-0807
