Private Lessons

Private lessons are a huge benefit to growing and excelling as a musician. For those that don’t know, private lessons are where you meet one-on-one with a professional musician on your instrument. It is kind of similar to tutoring, but not in that you are behind and needing to catch up. Taking private lessons helps you to grow further and faster as a musician. Simply put, no matter how much individual attention is attempted in our full band rehearsals, it cannot compare to working on your instrument with someone one-on-one. That being said, I strongly encourage students to take private lessons with professional instructors on a regular basis.

What are the benefits of taking weekly private music lessons? The list is endless! Some of the obvious student motivations for studying privately could include the immediate satisfaction: to get better, to do well on a playing test, to receive a scholarship, or to make it into All-District/All-State Band. These are immediate and worthy goals. However, we may want to consider them only a starting point on our musical journey. You may wish to consider some of the less obvious benefits of private study that do not exclude initial motivations but could be beyond our initial grasp. These might include learning to solve problems independently, learning to work within timelines to complete projects, learning to cope with stress, learning how to get back on the horse after we fall off, learning how to practice, learning how to take pride in an accomplishment, and learning how to work as a member of a team. It should be apparent that all of these items listed begin with “learning how to.” This is extremely important.

In a private lesson situation, teachers have the opportunity to work individually and directly with a student, at their own rate of progress in the process of learning. This is key to good teaching and the cornerstone of private lessons. Private teachers act as a guide to the process of self-discovery through music. If these are not foreign ideas to us, then we should applaud our child’s desire to seek lessons with a private teacher and support him or her in that undertaking wholeheartedly. I sincerely hope that you will consider the investment of study privately. With all investments there is a return which will be the defining entity that warrants extreme success. It is my sincere hope that at least some of the ideas presented here will stimulate your thought process regarding private music lessons.