Piano Lessons

Four to six years old is perfect. Anything up to 10 is ideal, and virtually any other age still affords a high probability of success with the right support and motivators. There is much research out there on the benefits of starting young, but we’ve found that once a child is comfortable in a structured learning environment (i.e. started Junior Kindergarten), creating and delivering engaging lesson plans becomes easier, with more consistent results. 

We offer Preschool programs starting at 2, and other instruments, such as guitar or drums, require a student to be more physically developed than piano; we start them at 6 or 7, depending on the child.

Yes, you can. Online piano lessons are here to stay, and our experience offering them has been amazing. We began building our online offering pre-pandemic, in November 2019, with the goal of bringing our classrooms to the world. We worked with dozens of our top teachers, and thousands of students, analyzing every aspect of the lesson to understand how we could make an online lesson even more fun and more effective than an in-person one. 

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with most teachers and families reporting that they appreciated many aspects of our new online lesson offering more than in-person lessons. 

We track our student’s progress from beginning to end – it helps us design better programs, and helps students and their parents see how much they’re improving.  It also lets us understand the underlying reasons for students who lose interest in music lessons. The industry average is less than 50% of students who start lessons will complete just one year. We’ve achieved over 80% for our first-year students, and 91% for our group programs. 

When the only activities are weekly lessons and practicing

Unfortunately with most piano lessons, the weekly lesson becomes the only way in which a student interfaces with music. Hockey players do more than skate drills, singers do more than warm-up, and ideally, piano players should do more than simply practice and get weekly coaching. Creating short, mid and long-term goals is critical, and participating in musical activities other than practicing gives the practice a purpose. 

So, all of our lesson programs include extensive chances to make music, share music, and take pride in what you’re learning, in fun and low-pressure settings. While a student can certainly work towards an exam or final recital, it can be daunting when that’s the only moment of achievement all year. The work simply outweighs the emotional rewards. Students at Merriam enjoy monthly recitals, jam sessions, time in a recording studio, and sharing music videos with friends and family – all ways in which we give our students a regular feeling of success and price in what they’re doing.

When practicing at home becomes a ‘solo’ activity, or it isn’t structured into the day

No one likes showing up to a coach and not being ready. But once it happens a few times, the more we accept it, and it stops being motivation to work towards the next goal. The entire cycle begins because with poor practice conditions and routines. For young students particularly, parents need to acknowledge the huge role they play in establishing routines and setting priorities. 

Parents who spend the time to practice with their kids at a regular time slot, and prioritize it within their lives, will experience dramatically lower rates of drop-out compared with those who leave the practicing (and ultimately the decision of whether to do piano lessons or not) entirely up to their young children. Attending math class, or doing math homework, simply isn’t an option, and kids figure that out pretty quickly; when piano lessons get treated the same, kids adopt them as a way of life.

Learning to “play piano” actually describes a collection of many skills, and each must be built in careful balance and coordination with one another. Additionally, different people may have different definitions for having ‘learned piano’. But for most beginners, the idea of being able to play a favourite song without mistakes, and possibly from memory, would be a typical concept of what it would mean to have learned the piano. 

The fastest way to achieve these benchmarks would be:

1. 1. Work with a coach with whom you get inspired, and who can hold you accountable 
   2. Listen constantly to the music you are learning, both the exact song(s) as well as the style in general
   3. Establish a daily practice routine that is highly structured and focus on the actual areas of work vs simply playing back your past achievements (a common error in people’s practice routines) 
   4. Ensure that you have a series of short, mid, and long term goals spread throughout the year so that your interest level stays high and there is a constant urgency to continue learning

Almost anyone, following the above and committing between 30-60 minutes daily to practice, could achieve a competent level of playing in as little as 18-24 months.