Piano Lessons In Tulsa | Practice Strategies
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
All right. In this podcast we’re going to be talking about practice strategies for piano lessons in Tulsa for your students, piano lessons in Tulsa primarily. So without further ado, my name is Steven. I have been an instructor at the Curtis music Academy for almost a year, a more like eight, nine months. And I have loved every second of it. It is one of the funnest jobs ever that I’ve ever had. I thoroughly enjoy teaching music. I enjoy teaching in general, and it’s one of my favorite things in life to do. I’m so glad that I get to be a part of Curtis music Academy story.
And without further ado, we’re talking about practice strategies for your guitar students. In my experience giving piano lessons in Tulsa, in my five years going on six now, I’ve gotten teach many different types of students, many different students from different ranges of skill. Some have been very, very young, some have been much older and it’s good to have a good, you know, plethora of experiences. And so I’ve gotten to teach really young students and learn, you know, things that have really helped them, with their, where they’re at in life. You know, they’re younger, state of life, and their needs are different than someone who might be a little bit older or even a lot older.
You know, they’re needing things that are a little bit more simple and more fun in piano lessons in Tulsa. Things that are easier to grasp than things that are little more on the complicated side. So something I would do for a younger student in having a practice strategy would be something more on the fun side. Hey, let’s play two chords. Just go back and forth just doing down strokes. That’s simple. And then, you know, having a more bouncy sound, just, you know, downstroke spoon, boom, boom, boom, you know, just boom, boom, boom, boom. Those are down strokes. When I say boom, and then I’m transitioning the cord and doing that exact same strum pattern.
And then telling them, you know, a second way or another way to practice at home would be to add, a pluck of the sixth string before you strummed the rest of the cord. So you would pluck the sixth string and then strum just one downstream on the, on the, the cord. And you do that a total of four times for each cord. So it adds this kind of fun bounce rhythm to it, which is really cool. And they feel at their age that they’re doing very, very well. One, they are doing very well, very well and it’s helping them to enjoy their learning process.
When it comes to a little bit older students such as, you know, teenagers, those that are maybe like 13 or even a preteen, 12, you know, 11, 12. But definitely teenagers 13 through like 15 or 17, you know, I’ll also teach a little bit differently in piano lessons in Tulsa. You know, I’ll kind of put a little bit more of a challenge in there. Still keeping it simple. I think simple is the common thread between all ages of students. Simple is scalable. Simple. Can be applied to any age. And the, the more simple we make things, the better they are and the easier they are our to grasp. And so I try to keep things pretty simple for my students in general, no matter what the age is now with the teenager, you know, category, I like to just give them a slight challenge yet keep it simple.
And also it’s important to keep, it’s, you know, a bit fun for these guys. They like the things, especially the, the one of the male students want to sound cool. They want to do some rifts, right? They want to sound like what they hear on TV, what they hear on the radio and what they see on TV, what they hear on the radio or even on their iPods or you know, phones. What do they hear on Spotify? What do they hear on, you know, different platforms of music listening, you know, are they hearing, you know, Sean Mendez do a really cool lick like he does in,
a specific song that he has. You know, these are all things that they’re thinking about in piano lessons in Tulsa. They’ve kind of wanted to impress their friends. They want to sound good, they want to also look good. Yet at the same time, they want to be efficient. They want it to be working for them. They want this exercise to be moving them and pushing them forward in their evolution as a musician. And so I would give them something like a scale or teach them a riff from like John Mayer’s gravity and that would be something cool that they can show, you know, their parents, maybe their friend and feel really good about themselves as well.
Another riff I would give them would be like Sean Mendez. You know, there’s nothing holding me back. The intro lick to that song. It’s simple, it’s doable. I learned it in about five minutes. I’m on YouTube and I know that they can also learn it with maybe even faster than, you know, there’s a lot of talented students I get to teach and so it’s really a blessing. And then some of my older students, you know, who are like 50, 60 years old and that, that age bracket, and maybe even above like 18, maybe they’re like 25, 30 or even 40.
They’re okay with having a more basic, still simple keeping that thread common but basic and they just really want to learn and really get down. So they’re more willing to use an imp. Apple apply exercises that might not be as fun yet. They can see the purpose in them and that’s what kind of lights them up is because they know they’re learning valuable, valuable skills and valuable exercises that help move them forward and help them to access, you know, quickness and, you know, accuracy in their playing.
Even warming up, you know, things like that. Warmups. It’s a principle kind of to warm up and then, you know, begin doing whatever the main thing is, whether that’s playing the song, it’s always going to be important and an essential step to warm up before you actually play whatever main song or whatever main thing you’re going to be playing. Main subject. So warm ups for kids would be like warm up, number one is what we call it. Mainly when I, when I’m presenting that warmup for a kid or someone under the age of 11 or 12, I will typically say, Hey, we’re going to learn the Caterpillar warm up.
And it’s where, you know, you take your pointer finger and put it at the first day on the first fret and each finger, falls in sequence on the next four frets. And then you slide down after the fourth finger, the pinky, you’ll slide down one Fred at a time and repeat that same sequence until your pinky reaches the 12th fret. So that is an exercise that I explained to my younger students as the Caterpillar X, warm up. And they like that they get the kind of smile or they chuckle or they laugh and they really liked that because it’s at their level. It’s fun. It’s cute. It’s, it’s innocent, right? A Caterpillar.
Yeah. I said, adult, you can just take the bland title of warmup number one, you know, or we can call this, the, we’re going to spider all the way up. You know, we’re going to crawl, you know, we’re going to, it’s just a finger warmup to kind of help us warm up the fingers and get some coordination flowing. That way we can play our song with more ease and our fingers are a little more warmed up. So that’s kind of the way I would approach practicing strategies for students is to focus on their age group. You know, what does it, what really ask yourself, what is your audience? Anytime you’re trying to give a practice strategy, does it need to be, it’ll always need to be simple yet.
Do you have some leeway with how fun it is and how attractive it is? You know, some, the younger students, you always want to make it fun, simple and enjoyable. And then, you know, for the older, as they get older, it doesn’t have to be as fun because they will begin to see more of the purpose in the exercise, no matter how fun or not fun it is. And so that is just one way, that practice strategies help from my experience. I hope that helps you. So go out and give the your best practice strategies cause you’ll know that they’ll, when a students.