dawn's piano

One hobby that I've really grown to love in the past few years is gardening - especially now that we have a yard with space for me to grow things! And I've learned a lot from watching my flowers get established and eventually bloom. Some of these lessons can apply to piano lessons as well. And so in today's post, I'll be sharing 3 things I've learned from gardening that apply to learning piano.  1. It takes time. I got to celebrate my very first peony blooms this year. I planted them as root cuttings back in 2019. The first spring they came up small, second year I had a bit more foliage, and now in year three we finally got to enjoy some blooms.  There's a saying in the gardening world when establishing perennial plants, and perhaps you've heard it before: "First year they sleep, second year they creep, third year they leap." And this is because perennials are long-lived plants that will bloom year after year once established. But they do require t...

Summer Day Camps are a major feature of summer for lots of children, and I am especially proud of our local Espressivo Piano Camp and what we are able to offer piano students for that first week of June each year. In this blog post, I wanted to share some highlights from this year's camp! One of my favorite sessions at piano camp for encouraging student curiosity and broadening musical experience and understanding, is our guest teacher session that happens in the middle of our week. This year we had pianist and organist Steve Gustafson come and give us an introduction to the organ. We learned a bit of the instrument's long history, and how it dates way back to before the Roman Era, and students got to pass around a few of the different types of pipes as we listened to the sounds they make and learned about the different stops and manuals on the organ.  Students even got the chance to volunteer to play the organ! Here are a couple Dawn's Piano students who gave it a try:  Ou...

Ear Training is an essential musicianship skill. It's what allows us to hear when a note is out of place in a piece of music, or to pick out a melody by ear. It's one half of audiating, the true musician superpower which combines both sight and ear training to be able to read and 'listen' to a piece of music in our heads.  Some of the beginning stages of ear training are to recognize things like directional movement (whether the notes are going up, down or staying the same), distance (if they're skipping, stepping or jumping over an interval), and quality (if we hear a major or minor chord or interval). This week's post is a round-up of some simple ways to practice Ear Training at home to help your piano kid develop and grow in this direction out of lessons.  Auralia While Auralia does offer a full curriculum for classroom & college teachers to assign to students ear training, in our studio we choose to isolate specific skills with the Auralia iOS apps . Wh...

I have long been a supporter, occasional guest, and regular behind-the-scenes contributor to the P iano Parent Podcast for several years now. And over that time I've shared many of my favorite episodes right here on the blog because I think it is a truly valuable resource for parents of piano students. So while I was meeting with Shelly, the podcast's host, to brainstorm ideas for the upcoming quarter, she invited me to record a quick teacher chat episode with her all about finger numbers and hand placement.  If you've ever wondered w hy we bother about finger numbers, h ow important they are really, or w hat the long term goal in prescribing finger numbers and hand placement in early music might be, then this episode is a worthwhile listen. Shelly & I both share our thoughts on hand placement, how we handle certain challenges in our teaching, and most importantly we have a few simple tips to help piano parents support learning good finger habits in home practice.  I in...

One thing a lot of people imagine being able to do when they take piano lessons, or sign their child up for piano lessons, is to just sit down and play at family gatherings or parties. Perhaps we even think of eventually being able to take requests of everything from classical or contemporary solo selections, to popular music that other musicians could jam along with or the crowd could sing along to.  And this can sometimes be a tricky area of expectation vs reality because classical playing and 'jamming' can feel like two separate musicianship skills until we mature as musicians enough to see the overlap.   Chord charts and lead sheets are tools that a lot of modern bands, worship teams, etc, use to pick up a song together quickly. They serve as a guide without prescribing every single note.  I've talked on the blog in the past about lead sheets . So in today's blog post, I'm sharing 3 reasons why I choose to introduce chord charts to my older students' piano s...

As many of you may already know, this summer the studio got a big upgrade with a new-to-us Kawai RX-2 grand piano. ( More about that here !) My old family piano was reaching the end of it's time as a good teaching instrument, and so I decided to retire it and give it new life by repurposing it into new furniture or art pieces. That process began by needing to take it apart, which in and of itself, is a pretty big project. So today's blog post is taking you behind the scenes on our piano deconstruction project.  We got off to a good start over the summer, and then had to pause with the beginning of the Fall and less free time. We found some time a weekend in December to finish taking it apart. A large part of the challenge was wanting to keep as much of the wood in tact as we could so that we'd have lots of interesting piano pieces to work with as we start to be creative.  This video is a time lapse that I took and shared on my Instagram stories as we worked on it. And I dec...

Before I jump right in to some of the reasons why I like rote teaching, let me give a little definition of what that actually means here. In the music teaching world, Rote Teaching means we teach the music without a sheet for the student to follow. Typically this is done by demonstration and repetition. I decided to try including some rote teaching about 6 years ago after learning about some of the possible benefits, and today I'm sharing some of the big positives I've seen in my own students since then! 5 Benefits of Rote Teaching for Beginners Building Technique I use a lot of the Piano Safari pattern pieces and animal techniques for beginning students. These are short pattern pieces that often focus on a specific skill or technique for striking the keys. Teaching these skills without having the added work of reading sheet music and translating that into notes means young students can really focus on how it feels  in their hands and fingers to play the given technique. Thes...