Nurturing the Love While Building The Skills:
We believe in nurturing the love of music while teaching solid skills that will allow our students to be independent and accomplish their musical goals. We are always happy to take song requests and love helping students explore and find music that really inspires them.
Beginners or experienced students welcome! Our teachers are professional musicians with impeccable music education who love sharing their passion for music with students.
Learning Through Music:
All music can be a vehicle for learning. Playing music you love shouldn’t be a far off goal. We know if students are doing the music they love, they will be more motivated. Each student builds their own custom binder of music they can play based on their interests.
Customized Lessons:
One-on-one lessons allow us to move at the perfect pace of the student and and make a plan according to their strengths, weaknesses and interests. Because music integrates so many different skills together, no one is usually a natural at all of the components. Each student has things that come easy to them and things are difficult. We customize learning plans and music arrangements to fit the goals and the needs of the individual student.
Reading Music:
We believe that reading music is an important part of being independent and literate in music. It allows musicians to capture ideas, jog the memory of old pieces and play new music right away. We have all kinds of great strategies, materials and tools to make learning to read music easy and fun.
Custom Content and Resources Built for Our Students:
We have created tons of learning content over the years customized and tweaked specifically for our students to help them learn as easily and enjoyably as possible. Including: Treblemakers Piano Method. Digital Quizzes, Notation Felt Board, Flash Cards, Rhythm Cards, Learning/Resource Videos and Practice Logs. Many of the above are resources we’ve made available for free on suzanstroud.com. We’ve also built a constantly growing server of sheet music at different levels and styles so that students have plenty of great sounding pieces to choose from.
Piano
Students learn to read music and while building solid piano skills through playing music they love.
Voice
Students work on the elements of singing through music they love accompanied by their teacher on piano.
Guitar
Students learn string reading, technique, coordination, chords and basic other guitar skills through music they love.
Drums
Students work on start with patterns that on the rudiments that build the dexterity and coordination needed to play the drums as well as learning simple patterns into playing songs right away.
Bass
Students learn string reading, technique, coordination, and other bass skills through music they love.
Play & Sing
Students work on both the skills of singing and playing. Piano/Voice or Guitar/Voice lend themselves best to this but we can usually integrate some playing and singing into any instrument lesson when requested.
What Happens in A Typical Lesson?
We customize every lesson to the individual students goals but we definitely have strategies and tools that we know work. We may integrate playing and singing, songwriting, recording in garageband, or many other things depending on what the student is interested in. Besides working on music, we use all of the following tools to help drill on information and skills while changing it up and keep the lesson fun.
Some Of TheTools We Use During Lessons:
Rhythm App 
Felt Board Notation 
Lesson Checklist 
Digital Quizzes 
Rhythm Cards 
White Board Notation 
Solfege Cats -Ear Training
Performance Opportunities:
We rent out space for end of year recitals so that students have a big goal to works towards during the year. It gives them a chance to show off what they learned, get positive feedback, see what others are doing and get re-inspired at a time of the school year when everyone starts to feel less motivated.
We also provide other more informal opportunities to perform during the year. We often join in on Old Stone House’s Halloween Activities by dressing up in costumes and playing Halloween themed music, performing at our tent at the 5th Avenue Street fair or joining in to the MakeMusic festival or other street fairs. This is a low-pressure way to perform and usually results in honest compliments from strangers that are outside enjoying the festivities.
Who We Teach:
Our teachers teach students across levels and ages. We have lots of experience working with a variety of students and have lots of unique strategies for each. Whether it’s changing the lesson up with lots of small activities to work the same info for young ones or playing along on other instruments to jam with teens or adults, we’re tuned in to how students are responding to the lessons. The pure joy of music is what brought all of us to music and we want to share that with our students no matter how music fits into their lives.
How to Know if Your Child is Ready for Lessons:
Check out Suzan’s blogpost ‘Is Your Child Ready for Music Lessons?’ to determine if your child is ready to start music lessons. We are also always happy to do a trial lesson and assess your child’s readiness.
Equipment Recommendations:
Here are some of our recommendations for musical instruments, equipment and supplies. We do get a small commission from Amazon but are not sponsored by any company and only choose to recommend things we like.
Because most of our instrument recommendations are meant for beginners, we try to chose things that are functional and affordable. However, we won’t recommend something that is flimsy or doesn’t function well as that can make it harder to learn. Because of that, we won’t usually recommend off-brands as they don’t have a known track record and often cut corners in important areas that may not be noticeable to the eye.
Click here for guitar recommendations
