Custom-Tailored Music Lessons for Adults

Although adults have much better and faster hand/eye coordination from typing, reading, and general life skills, this makes their learning primarily in the Left Brain. We adults rely on our left brain to learn everything new that we do, because it where the meticulous, detail oriented, information is stored. Usually, this works very well for us. The left brain, although it can be a bit slow, is very reliable for factual information.

Unfortunately, when playing music with feeling and passion, the left brain fails us. First of all, the left brain gets caught up in all of the tiny details of reading the music. It will check which note is on the paper, which finger is on the note, and what the ear is hearing, and try to do it all at once. Our mental processor ends up moving at an incredible speed, as it checks and double checks all of the information in the song, but it has no way of tracking the big picture of the song's melody and feel. Everything ends up slowing w-a-y d-o-w-n....

How Do We Turn Off the Left Brain?

The only way to play with spontaneity and fluidity is to "turn off" the left brain, and start letting your right brain play the song for you. This requires you to put yourself in a "zone" where you don't think at all about the details of the song or the notes, and just start feeling the tune of the song.

A strategy that can be employed is to have the student sing the melody line of the song while they are playing it. It is humanly impossible to think in the "left" brain when you are singing.

We utilize a lot of different strategies to get our adult students into the zone of their right brain while playing... and the results are phenomenal. Adults who have never been able to memorize a song, are able to finally play without the music. This is the first step... trusting your brain to play the right notes without music.

The book "drawing on the right side of the brain" has strategies for learning to draw while shutting down the left brain. We use a lot of the strategies in this book in piano lessons for adults. It is always helpful to do as much research on this subject as possible. Taking a few drawing classes with this method will also help the adult to shut off their mind.

The Key to Enjoying Playing as an Adult

Using primarily the right brain to play music that is more complex also makes it possible for adults to get the fluency that they strive for when they start lessons later in life. The whole key to enjoying the music that is being played is to stop thinking about the details and play memorized music. When you do this, you will be using the right side of your brain. We have many techniques to help teach you to memorize your music, and have been very successful in this, even with people who have never been able to memorize. It turns out that memorizing music has everything to do with whether you have been taught to play “by ear”. We have a whole system by which we can teach you the skill of playing “by ear”, both by teaching you how to:

1. remember and play rhythms you hear,
2. remember and sing melodies you hear, and
3. remember and play melodies you hear.

Once you get good at recognizing rhythms and melodies, “by ear”, you will be able to play the melodies of the songs you have been learning, “by ear”… which is what memorization is.