Home Piano Lessons in the Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Finsbury Park vicinity
Hello there, I'm Alvin.
I am a piano teacher offering lessons at your home. You can also have remote lessons via Zoom, Skype or Google Meet.
I travel to Crouch End, Hornsey, Muswell Hill, Islington, Finsbury Park, Highgate and Wood Green. The range of postcodes I cover includes N4, N5, N6, N8, N10, N17, N19 and N22.
You'll learn to play adaptations of well-known music, across genres such as classical, pop, rock, anime, metal and jazz. The music you'll play in lessons is familiar, current, and at a suitable level of difficulty.
You'll also learn how to improvise your own version of existing songs.
If you like, you can prepare for
Why Learn the Piano With Me?
You'll learn positively, with music tailored to your abilities.
We'll work from music that you can play and move on to more difficult repertoire as your skills and concentration improve. The focus is positive, on what you can do and what you can aim for.
You'll develop your current piano skills so you can continually play harder, impressive-sounding music. I'll also show you how you can improvise your own versions of your favourite songs.
You'll get to play music you like.
Piano playing requires co-ordination of six or seven independent tasks, and it is always reassuring and satisfying to know you are playing the correct notes.
Playing songs you are familiar with also helps with improve the reading of musical notation, because you'll have already have an idea of what the music should sound like, and hence know what the written notes, rhythmic symbols and expression marks are trying to convey.
In my own time, I write out and arrange your favourite songs at a suitable level of difficulty for you to play, at no extra charge to you.
Do you know any other piano teacher who does that on a regular basis?
I charge reasonable rates and am flexible.
My rates vary depending on your location, but they are comparable to rates charged by local music services for children's piano lessons in schools. The current rate charged by Haringey Music Service is £33.00 per hour for the academic year 2020-21.
In some cases - such as when siblings have lessons, and if I'm already in your area - I charge the school lesson rate, or less !
I teach in areas such as Crouch End, Hornsey, Finsbury Park, Muswell Hill and Wood Green, and my travel costs are shared among students. Please contact me to ask - my rates are frequently lower than most teachers who do home visits.
I have no cancellation fees.
I am particularly understanding if you need to cancel at short notice (e.g. due to child illness). Or maybe you've suddenly remembered about another appointment - as long as I've not appeared at your doorstep, that's fine!
Other music schools or tutors may require you to give 24 hours' notice for cancelling a lesson. I don't - no one plans an illness in advance! - and I understand that life sometimes just gets a little bit complicated for our liking!
Need a recap?
Music you like
A positive learning process
Very reasonable rates
No cancellation fees, no contract, no notice period!
Today's blog snippet - see more in the Posts section!
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One of the often touted benefits of learning to play the piano is the ability to multitask, and how this can be transferable to other areas in life. The difficulty level of playing the piano has been linked to various other activities, including flying an aeroplane. Is it possible that playing "Fur Elise" or "Chopsticks" is as difficult as landing tonnes of flying metal onto a narrow strip of road?
Unfortunately, this benefit is slightly dubious and is one that the media (and piano teachers) have consistently latched on. If there were any crossover benefit, then the reverse should be true. Individuals who work in a field where they have to consistently multitask should be better at playing the piano. Do airline pilots make the best piano players? For every one that justifies the rule, you'll find one that contradicts it. Do office administrators who have to deal with a litany of tasks in daily life necessarily have an advantage? Do parents who have had to deal with running their own lives while bringing up their children make better pianists than singles? Do pianists make better restaurant chefs?
The truth is you probably become good at what you practice and become familiar with, and any crossover multitasking benefit is minimal. Want to be a better pianist? Practise the piano. Don't count on the fact that you are a good chef. Or breakdancer.
What is common in all these various fields, however, is that you have to process a lot of information and translate these in the blink of an eye into required actions. A pilot has to gauge all the information from the console and make adjustments to the plane's flight. A chef has to use senses of sight, touch, smell and taste to determine if food is ready. A pianist has to translate visually the dots on a sheet of paper, and refine the touch of the hands and foot pedals using the sense of sound as a feedback mechanism.
So there is a lot to manage when playing the piano. There is a lot of information to process. How do you improve at playing the piano?
By keeping the amount of information you have to process at a manageable level.
In this post, I argue that the traditional method of learning five notes in the right hand, then the five in the left hand, before combining them is too much of a jump at the two-hand stage because the information required by the mind to process has jumped exponentially.
The linear method of working at the start of a piece, attempting the music in a bar by bar format may also not be the most time-effective method, because you are immediately presented with the full weight of what you have to process, and have to plod through the music.
If learning to play the piano involves training the mind to manage and incrementally process more information, we can adopt the same process when learning a piece of music. Most students start by learning the individual parts to a piece of music, then struggle for a bit to do two hands because the processing demands on the mind have exponentially increased.
Instead, try learning the melody to a piece of music first. Then add the bass note of the chord in each bar. When you have managed that, add the two or three notes of each chord, then gradually add the non-harmony notes in the right hand, before splitting the left hand part into broken chords. You should progress fairly easily between each of these stages, because the gap you have to bridge is not that distant.
And because you are constantly making measurable strides towards covering the music in its entirety, the whole process of learning is positively reinforcing.
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