Guitar Lessons in Tulsa | Lesson Setup and Timeframe
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Curtis Music Academy podcast. Thank you for joining me on this warm and sunny afternoon, I hope you’re all doing well. Today I wanted to talk about how we schedule our guitar lessons in Tulsa plans, and why we think this is the most effective way to help our students learn as well as possible. Of course, our first priority is accommodating the schedules of our students and how they want to learn. Our goal is to always be flexible to what the student feels would be the best course of action for them, even if it requires doing things in a way we have never tried or even considered before.
And of course, most of our students don’t plan for music to be their entire profession and career (though some do and that’s awesome), so we have to understand that their guitar lessons in Tulsa most likely not be the most important commitment in their lives. And because we want to give every potential student the chance to experience success and enjoyment in their instrument, we are always willing to move or alter our lessons however we need to for our students to be able to come study with us. That being said, the vast majority of our students take one thirty-minute lesson with their instructor every week.
This is actually the schedule that such an overwhelming majority of our students prefer that we actually have a rough timeline of how to conduct thirty-minute guitar lessons in Tulsa. Of course, most of the time the lesson will not follow that timeline exactly, based on how long each student and instructor spends in each area, and where each student is struggling or has questions or comments. But pairing a student’s individual needs and wants to alter the schedule, the general layout for a thirty-minute lesson is as follows: the instructor opens each lesson with a few minutes of conversation with each student. As we’ve discussed in previous podcasts, we really want to have a personal relationship with each student and each instructor really does enjoy getting to know and spend time with each of their pupils.
Following that short conversation, the instructor will give a brief overview of the guitar lessons in Tulsa and what they are planning to cover and help the student accomplish that day. Following that, the lesson will move into a review of the material and concepts the student has been covering in the past few weeks, especially areas that are particularly complex or that the student has been struggling with, just to remind the student of what they have been working on and to begin to really cement those ideas in their head. On paper, this section is slated to take about three minutes. Following this, the instructor will spend roughly five minutes just really helping the student refine and polish the material they have been reviewing to make sure the material is sounding great and the student is able to work with the piece at a high level.
Following this, the largest portion of the lesson, which is slated to take about half of the thirty-minute allotment of the lesson, is viewing, talking through, and beginning to practice new material. This section will vary widely based on the experience of the student. If the student is a fairly new beginner to their instrument, they might be introduced to a new scale or set of notes, or a new aspect of how to play their instrument. For more advanced students, this area might consist of introducing a new musical piece, often one that the student selected as one they are interested in playing.
A really cool thing here at Curtis Music Academy is that many of our instructors are also very skilled at music theory, so even if sheet music for a certain song on that student’s particular instrument is readily available, they can listen to the song and either convert the music of another instrument to the one the student plays, or write a new accompaniment for that instrument for the chords of the piece. So it’s always really nice to get to watch students learn and play music that they are really excited about, and that helps further their love for their instrument and their music. Anyway, after that section, there is just a quick wrap up for the guitar lessons in Tulsa, where the instructor will briefly review what they covered that day and will present recommendations for how the student can practice that upcoming week.
And because individual practice is one of the most important parts of learning an instrument, the last couple of minutes will be spent discussing and answering questions about practice and how the student should do it. With younger students we like to enforce that they should be practicing in an area they won’t be distracted and at a time when they don’t have other commitments. So that is a rough outline of how a thirty minute once a week guitar lessons in Tulsa would run. However, we have some students who choose to have more than one thirty-minute session with their instructor each week in order to accelerate the pace of their learning and advancement with their instrument. And in that case the lesson plan is roughly the same, but less time is dedicated to review because there has been a shorter gap between lesson sessions.
We also have some students who also wish to learn at an accelerated rate and take more in-depth guitar lessons in Tulsa, but due to the length of their commute or the demands of their schedule prefer to only come in once a week. For those students, we often schedule longer lesson sessions, typically either forty-five minutes or an hour-long lesson. And for our youngest students who have trouble concentrating for longer periods, we sometimes shorten lessons from thirty minutes down to fifteen as they are just beginning to study their instrument. That is just a bit on lesson setup and scheduling here at Curtis Music Academy. Thank you so much for joining me today.