Every August, my inbox fills with a version of the same question: is fall the right time to start piano lessons? Families are signing up
Most of us learn on one instrument. You sit down at a modern piano, you press a key, and a felt-covered hammer throws itself at
This fall I am starting a Master of Music in piano performance at the University of South Florida. I was accepted this spring with a
Every August, the family calendar gets rewritten. School starts, activities resume, homework returns, and the loose rhythm of summer disappears overnight. In my studio, students
You do not need to spend a fortune to start piano lessons, but the instrument you practice on shapes everything about how you learn. Here is what actually matters: 88 keys, weighted hammer action, and touch sensitivity.
The decision is made, the first lesson is on the calendar, and now comes the question every family asks me: what should we expect, and
One of my students came to me this week with big dreams. We are barely a month into lessons, still working through the early pieces
Learning to play an instrument changes the brain in measurable ways, and those changes show up at every stage of life. After years of teaching
Many pianists taught to read music letter-by-letter progress slowly through scores, silently naming each note: E, G, B, D, F. They can decipher any piece eventually, but fluent sight-reading remains elusive. Intelligence and musical sensitivity are not the bottleneck. Method is. Research on how accomplished sight-readers actually process musical notation reveals a starkly different strategy. Fluent readers do not name individual letters. Instead, they read by shapes, contours, and spatial patterns anchored to a handful of landmark notes. This insight offers a faster pathway to fluent reading for students at any level.
Motivation seems like it should be simple. You either want to practice or you don’t. But decades of research in psychology reveals a more nuanced picture.
One of the most common requests from piano students is to skip ahead. “Can we learn this piece instead?” “I don’t need scales; can we just work on repertoire?” “Why do we have to learn this before moving on?” The impulse is understandable.
“Practice for 30 minutes” is not deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a rigorous methodology based on decades of cognitive psychology research, formalized most notably by psychologist Anders Ericsson.
