Do beginners need a different tailored approach?

Piano lessons for beginners at WKMT – Teaching a beginner piano student needs specialised hands. Being an amazing performer is not always enough to guarantee your students will get the most successful training. The skills involved in teaching are various and very specific: patience, pedagogy and empathy, amongst others. As if that wasn’t enough the chemistry between student and teacher also plays a decisive role in the degree of success the lesson will achieve. The main points to teach are: basics of musical language and piano technique (gymnastic side of it)

About the musical language…

This is maybe the trickiest part of teaching a beginner piano student from the scratch. Fortunately, there is a shortcut J.

Sight-reading piano scores implies dealing with polyphony while pitching is resolved by the keyboard itself. Yes, as pianists we don’t need to care about “creating” each note pitch-wise, but we have to make sure all the simultaneous ones we play, fall all in place. Dealing with multiple notes implies we need to play much more attention to the changes they experience, far more than to the pitches in their absolute expression. In simpler words, the beginner piano student needs to be alert to spot which and what kind of changes occur to the notes at all times. Following these methodology, our first-lesson-students manage to play hands together in 95% of the cases after just 40 minutes of lesson.

About the piano technique itself…

Piano technique is maybe the most neglected topic by piano teachers. We all tend to focus on the pragmatic side of performing. We try and make sure our students finish their first lesson doing as much as possible, but are they doing all that correctly? That’s a different thing… The real challenge is to induce fast paced quality progress. At WKMT we start talking about piano technique from day 1. Weight management and pianistic movements integrate the vocabulary of our fresh piano students since the very beginning.

Learning at WKMT is enjoyable, not only because it is done seriously, but also because it works! You have fun, you learn lots and you can easily tell the difference.

Come and join us at WKMT – London and start your journey towards becoming the pianist of your dreams.

#pianolessonsforbeginners