piano lessons
Piano lessons at Grace Allwood Music are different for each student, but it’s useful sometimes to know what the common themes are for my lessons, and the structure these take. As a teacher of mostly beginner to intermediate piano players, I find that the following structure works for many of my students.
I teach using tuition books for my very beginners. This is great for clear instruction, graphics, engaging and progressive pieces. It’s also useful for adult beginners because they can recap and progress at their own pace.
We start with simply playing the piece that they've been working on over the week. While warm-ups for advance players may be useful to avoid repetitive strain injuries and prepare them for complicated movements across the instrument, for simple pieces I find it is easier for the students to play something they’ve been getting comfortable with. This may be the piece they’ve been asked to practice over the week previous, but it might be something that they find enjoyable and easy to get used to the studio piano that day. This is massively important as no two pianos play the same.
As the lesson progresses we move onto the newer pieces of music, or exercises that have been part of the intended practice between lessons. While this is to help improve technique, music reading, and other skills associated with playing piano, we are looking for consistency, understanding and embedding of these skills across multiple lessons. There are multiple different ways to achieve this, and different strategies will suit different learners, but all lead back to clear and concise practice that will be useful not just in that specific piece, but across their continued learning journey.
For those a little further into their journey, we spend time looking at specific technical exercises, introducing scales, arpeggios and other exercises to focus on developing dexterity and specific techniques for playing more complex pieces of music. This covers not just being able to play the scales, but also construct the patterns, and write the patterns as music. I aim to provide a well rounded music tuition that isn’t just practical playing based.
After working through new pieces, technical exercises and any other questions or areas that need improvement, for my younger students I try to add a little extra fun. The joy of using a digital piano is the bank of extra sounds that are available to them. So with a little spin of the instrument wheel, we play through one of our songs with different sounds (they’re given 10 seconds to choose).
Trust me you’ve never heard anything quite like “Old Mac Donald” played with pitched explosions!
From there its back to the home practice. I check with the students that they have nothing additional to ask me - a dangerously open question! Check that they’re happy with what they need to practice over the week, and then wave them goodbye from the studio door. Their lesson is uploaded to the secure section of their profile and available for them to watch back before their next lesson.
Does this sound like something you’d like to do? Why not fill in my contact me form and I’ll be in touch about available lessons and booking you in for your free telephone consultation.
