How Not To Waste Your Money On Piano Lessons

Piano lessons with a trained professional are expensive, there is no getting around it. And if you stop to think about what a piano teacher, or any other kind of musical instrument teacher, does with their students it is easy to see why they are expensive. Each week this person who has spent decades of their life dedicated to the study of a musical instrument, performance, practice and history sits down with each student one at a time and, with patience, spends up to an hour engaging with the student. Conversation, listening, instructing, and perhaps a little joking. Dedicated interpersonal dialogue with a student and this musician gets to know the student. This musician gets to unravel the knots this student faces when trying to learn something. This musician unlocks their potential.

Of course this is all well and good if it works the way it is supposed to. So often, unfortunately, it does not. Countless stories of former piano students who despised their teachers, or who could never quite "get it" show just how often this arrangement fails the students, and their parents. So we should be getting to the root of the problem and exploring ways to fix it. Inefficiencies in systems are not seen as "just the way things are," they are worked on.

In this paper I will outline the key ways I believe this can be fixed. I apply it to music lessons as that is where my field of work exists, but its concepts are more broadly applicable.

Step 1.

When deciding on an instructor choose one that has a personality that you find appealing. Meet them, talk with them, ask them questions about real and relatable things. Parents who seek teachers based on their academic credentials or performance career alone may find themselves working with a great musician who is a terrible communicator. So meet them in person, or virtually as the times now call for, and get to know them.

Step 2.

Make a plan for success. For the time being, I will address parents who are putting their children into lessons but this idea would apply to adults as well. Make a plan that starts on day one. This plan should include what the goals are for the student, what the practice requirements will be, what the practice schedule will be, and what rewards or consequences will be expected if the practice schedule is not maintained as agreed to. This alone is one of the biggest money wasting culprits, a lack of planning. Students go each week to their lesson where the instructor lays out the information in a way that is easily understood by a child and then sends them on their way to put into practice the elements that were discovered that day only to have the student spend all week doing whatever they want, ignoring their practice, and returning to the studio the following week having lost most of what was discovered the previous week.

Why does this happen? Most of the time it is because practice is left up to the student to accomplish whenever it fits into their busy life, or when they have nothing left to do. Both of these random times bring with them a sense of dread, tension, and irritation regarding practice. When the student, of any age, waits until they have nothing else to do, then they have already been counting down the tasks at hand and gotten prepared for rest and relaxation, perhaps in front of the tv or playing a game. To then be told that they need to practice instead, resentment for practice can form. We remember activities and the feelings associated with them and then we subconsciously avoid or talk ourselves out of doing the ones we recall with tension and resentment. The same is true if a student is asked to stuff practice in where ever they can during their busy day. It interrupts their day, it gets in the way of something else. It disrupts their rhythm.

The remedy for this is to plan practice and stick to it. It does not need to be the same time every day, but it should be planned out at least a week at a time. Other activities then get planned around it just like if it were a lesson or recital itself. No more is practice time jutting into the day uninvited, it has a dedicated time slot which, if practice doesn't occur, nothing else is planned to occur in its place. It would be an empty time slot. Then beyond this I would recommend having a system of reward for good practice habits. Nothing extravagant but something that definitely feels like a reward. Perhaps getting to choose what will be had for dinner one evening after a whole month of good practice, or getting to skip their night to wash the dishes, etc. Similarly, there should be a consequence for failing to practice regularly. I always like to find extra-credit ways for students to get out of the consequences, like practicing an extra day and for twice as long, or something like that. Their teacher might also have extra credit pages on theory or history that could be filled out.

To summarize this point, the lack of practice between lessons is where most of the financial investment into lessons in the first place gets lost. To remedy this it is my suggestion that you formulate a plan for success that includes scheduling practice times on a weekly basis and creating a reward for accomplishing that goal.

Step 3.

Finding the motivation to put step 2 into action. People are motivated to accomplish tasks big and small by a calculation that determines which is better: Do the thing, or Don't do the thing. We are constantly foretelling our own future, imagining it is happening or just happened, and then judging our own feelings about it. Take choosing a sandwich for lunch. Unless you are an severely indecisive person like me where I have to go through the pain of choosing once, and then I order the exact same thing forever from that place, you can easily test the way we choose to do things. You imagine the ingredient and how you would feel if you just ate it. Pepperoni, cheese, lettuce, salt, etc. You imagine yourself being very upset with yourself for breaking your diet or you remember suddenly that you're out of antacid so the spicy items are off the list. We find motivation to do things, like practicing, in a similar way. We imagine how we will feel during or after practicing vs. if we just skip it and then we weigh the benefits. Scheduling practice eliminates some of the need for this, but it is still true that finding the motivation or inspiration to practice is important. This can be done by setting small goals and achieving them and documenting the achievements to remember later. Parents can also help young students find this motivation by listening intently to their practices. Kids before a certain age really have an audience of Parent, and that is what is most motivating for them. When they see you smile, they want to do it again. As kids get older the idea that their peers will know that they are pianists starts to become important. If they believe that friends and classmates will be impressed that they play the piano, they will find motivation to continue.

It is really important to find inspiration to remain excited by the instrument being pursued. Listening to performances, watching concerts, talking about it with people who are also very interested in it are great ways to build the excitement for it. Music is, after all, a very social activity.

Step 4.

Not all music students study music so they can become professionals on that instrument some day, and that is just fine. Studying music can help open doors to other opportunities and will enrich the life of the student, at all ages. It is not necessary that the student choose by age 10 whether or not they plan to take this all the way to a career in the arts. This being the case, it is still important that the lessons they do get are treated with a sense of importance. The same way that coaches who work with little league teams still insist on everyone showing up on time and ready to work, even though they are not likely all working toward a career in that sport. So choose a teacher who has a professional studio and who you determine has a work ethic that matches your expectations.

To end this I would like to go back to how I started. A private music teacher is expensive and we should expect that to be the case. They are a professional musician who has spent decades perfecting their craft on a complicated musical instrument who is then hired to spend up to one hour per week with you or your child, engaged in communication and instruction individually tailored to you, or your child. They are a funnel taking all of the musical knowledge and understanding and pouring it into every lesson, but with an attention to how the student learns, how fast they pick up concepts, and how interested they are in it.

The way to avoid wasting money on a piano teacher is to choose one that you find appealing personally after getting to know them through conversation, but who should also be a professional with a work ethic to back that up. Then make sure to schedule practice, plan for success, and work to find the motivation and inspiration to improve.

Thank you for reading. I am a professional oboist and pianist who teaches from a studio in a nonprofit music school I opened called Sound Studios Olympia. I have almost 2 decades of teaching experience and I have seen my students go on to do well in competitions, recitals, auditions, and win scholarships to major universities and conservatories. My purpose for writing this was to share a little about my philosophy regarding how we learn and how private music lessons could be improved.