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 £40.32 per hour for the academic year 2025-26.
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!
In the years before recording and broadcasting became popular, or before it became possible to record sounds onto media, instruments that played pre-set tunes were very popular. If you had one of these instruments, the need for a live musician was no longer a requirement. You could get music for entertainment simply by turning a handle or some sort of lever to provide an audience with music for functions such as social dancing, entertainment or religious ones such as church services. That is in stark contrast to today's society, where you are almost inundated with music in a world where people try to use it to influence your behaviour. Society is full - arguably too full - of electrical and non-electrical devices that will give you music even if you don't want it!
One of the more popular mechanical instruments in 18th century Italy was the barrel organ. The instrument was popularised by Giovanni Barbieri, and went on to assume his name - at least in French circles, where it was known as the orgue de Barbarie. In a way it is not dissimilar to the broken chord Alberti bass pattern, which took on the name of the musician that made it well known. Barbieri's organ was a small instrument that rested on the player's left hip while the player's right hand turned a handle. The handle in turn moved a drum with raised studs or pins, which as it moved came into contact with triggers that opened panels that deflected wind from the bellows to enter into different pipes, each pipe playing a note in the music.
Each full rotation of the barrel produced a complete song.
In the nineteenth century, the size of the organs grew in proportion to the complexity and length of the music. Some organs also had more than one barrel and could hence play different tunes.
Barbieri's instrument and the technology (for its time, anyway) grew to be more popular than the pioneer himself. So much so that in France, the instrument was increasingly marketed as "un veritable orgue de barberie fait par les sauvages". In the early 19th century, an Italian living in Paris by the name of Gavioli started making large portable ones by replacing the barrel with cardboard strips. This made the organ lighter although it did not necessarily result in an overall size reduction. Gavioli's organs were made portable by carrying them around in hand carts, where they were pushed out to streets and played by people known as "organ grinders"!
Orchestrion
The orchestra of the future? Not quite, but you can see where the invention was headed for. The orchestrion was a organ that attempted to recreate the sound of the orchestra instead of the monotonous drawl of the organ, which must have seemed quite futuristic at that time. This resulted in it having an immense range of pipes of different sounds to imitate the orchestral instruments, even including percussion instruments like cymbals and drums, taking up a lot of space, and costing a lot. Only wealthy households could afford an orchestrion.
As with many things, when the move towards bigger and grander designs had been explored, the mood shifted towards smaller and sleeker items that could do the same job. So as the taste for bigger musical instruments became satiated, their popularity declined. In the 1820s and 1830s the music box and its the clockwork driven cylinder mechanism made an emergence. The pins on the cylinder raised the tongues of the steel comb, and when they pinged back in place the vibration of the tongues produced notes. The later arrival of the gramophone, however, relegated the music box to status of novelty item.
All these musical instruments of the past - the barrel organ, the orchestrion and the music box - may seem antiquated in comparison to today's music playing devices, and they are - can you imagine having one Iphone for every four or five songs you listened to? But if you ever looked at the inner mechanism of one, even the humble music box, it is difficult not to appreciate the both the simplicity in materials used for the construction as well as the design of one. Who could have thought that a cylinder with a few raised studs on it would be the technology behind the mechanical instrument?
It is also difficult not to appreciate the craft and skill that has gone into creating the music "sheet", the flat metal with studs that eventually goes around the barrel. While later craftsmen who created the replica tunes for subsequent machines had a template to follow, how did the pioneering craftsmen work out the differences in spacing between the pins of the barrel that would ensure the tune produced would be correct, right down to the last semiquaver? If some studs were a little too close, the music would sound too fast in sections; too far apart and some notes would sound late. Either way, a high degree of precision was needed to make sure the studs aligned both vertically and horizontally.
Take your typical piano sheet music. Turn it ninety degrees to the right, so the bass and treble clefs are at the top. Each dot on the staves represents a stud on the barrel or cylinder that instrument makers have to create but on a much smaller scale. The notes that are viewed horizontally have to match, so that they come in at the same time, and the vertical spacing between studs has to be right so that the duration of notes is correct before the next one comes in. In the humble music box the accuracy has to be right down to the last millimetre.
For the barrel organ, which relied on air being correctly funneled to pipes, the same level of accuracy was required. If the panel opened too much because the pin was too big, too much air entered the pipe and it sounded too loud.
So how did the instrument makers go about creating the music sheet for these instruments? The answer is no surprise, because the principles are the same with learning any craft or skill. The craftsman working on the music box had an idea of what he wanted to achieve and went about in a methodical way to attain the result. He had some idea of where the marks were going to be; some sort of general impression. In the course of the actual construction work he rechecked his marks by wrapping the partially finished sheet over a cylinder and going over the notes to check they were playing correctly. He would then turn his attention to correcting any errors, then playing through sections to check if the studs were correct and would play the correct notes in the correct time, and repeat the whole process, until he had a whole song. But the song wasn't always necessarily constructed in a linear order from start to finish. In more complex songs, sections of music were broken up, and the pins were worked on in different sections before being assembled together.
We can approach a piece of music in the same way. Get a general impression of a piece of music before you attempt it. Listen to a recording to get an idea of how it sounds, and then try sight reading it just to get a general idea. Work on extensive pieces of music in short sections, rather than in a linear fashion wholly from start to finish. Go over the bars of music that are incorrect to improve them rather than be too enamoured with the parts that you have played correctly. It is rewarding for the ego to hear yourself playing nice music, but to bring the sections that are weaker in performance to the same standard as the others. Then you have something that is consistent in quality throughout the duration of the piece.