Sherwin - Piano Tutor - New York
1st lesson free
Sherwin - Piano Tutor - New York

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Sherwin

  • Rate US$55
  • Response 1h
Sherwin - Piano Tutor - New York

US$55/hr

1st lesson free

Contact

1st lesson free

1st lesson free

  • Piano
  • Keyboard
  • Synthesizer

Learn Piano with Sherwin: Patient, Personal Lessons for Beginners, Adults, Kids and Everyone Who Loves Music

  • Piano
  • Keyboard
  • Synthesizer

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About Sherwin

My lessons start with listening rather than reading. Before we open any book, I ask you to play something you already know, even if it is only a few bars of a nursery tune or a piece you have been stuck on for months. I am listening for the sound: whether the notes of a melody carry the same weight, whether the left hand is swallowing the right, whether a phrase ends where it should or gets dropped early. Then I ask you to describe what you heard in your own words. A complete beginner will often say the playing sounded bumpy or lurched, and that is exactly the right place to start. A student who has played for years usually hears more than they expected once they are asked to listen instead of just getting through the notes. Either way, the description tells me far more than a wrong note count ever could, and it gives you a way to check your own playing from the first week onward.

When something is not working, I do not simply repeat the instruction more loudly. If you can play a passage slowly but the moment you speed up the same three notes collapse, I stop treating the whole passage as one problem. I find the exact transition where it breaks, usually the moment the thumb passes under the hand in a scale or the jump between two chords, and I have you play only the two notes on either side of that point, with a small pause before the second one. Then we add the rotation of the wrist or the drop of the arm as a separate action, so you can feel which movement is doing the work and which is only getting in the way. For a young beginner I might turn the same idea into a game, asking for the second note to sound exactly as loud as the first. For a returning player who has been away from the instrument, I might start with the left hand alone and the melody alone, to find out which hand has forgotten more before asking them to work together. The same principle, isolating the point of failure, looks different at each of those levels, and I use whichever version fits the person in front of me.

I want you to leave each lesson able to practice without me. For that reason I rarely ask anyone to memorize a piece by repetition alone. Instead we find landmarks in the music: the place where a phrase arrives on its harmonic destination, a return of the opening figure, a sequence that repeats one step higher. Once you can see where you are in the music, a mistake becomes a location rather than a disaster. I also teach rhythm and pitch separately when a passage refuses to settle. You might tap the rhythm of a difficult run on the closed lid of the piano while humming its top line, then play it with the dotted rhythm exaggerated, and only then return to the original. When you are improvising, I often set a deliberate limitation: five notes, black keys only, or a left hand that stays on one chord, because a tight limit forces you to make real choices about shape, color and direction instead of running up and down the keyboard on reflex. Limitations like these are where a student begins to sound like the person making the music.

Because I teach from the sound outward, the material itself can be very different from one student to the next. A seven-year-old might be learning a film theme for the first time, and we spend most of the lesson on evenness in the right hand and on letting the fingers return to the keys. A teenager who wants to play a pop song from a chord chart might find that the song is really a bass line and a sequence of chords, so we strip it down to those and rebuild the accompaniment before adding the melody back on top. An adult who has come back after twenty years may want to play a Bach prelude that feels out of reach, and we begin with one voice from it, learning how the hands divide the work. Someone refining a Chopin nocturne is usually fighting the pedal, so we work out which notes must sing above the accompaniment and where each pedal change has to fall. The structure of the lesson stays the same in each case, listen, find the failure, isolate it, and return it to the real music, but what I am listening for changes completely. What you should expect is not a stack of exercises to finish. It is a lesson in which you hear more clearly, understand why a passage behaves the way it does, and gradually need me less to tell you what to do next.

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English

Most of my lessons turn on one habit: comparing. When you learn something new at the piano, I would rather you hear two versions of it than hear me describe one. In a first lesson, we might play two notes with your arm held loosely, then again with the wrist locked, and you will hear the difference before I explain it. You will also feel which version takes less effort. Children often find this the most satisfying part because they get to be the judge. Adults returning after time away often find it reassuring, since the question is rarely "are you doing it right?" and more often "which of these sounds better to you, and why?"

The same method changes shape as you move on. Say you can play a run slowly, but the moment you push the tempo, the left hand blurs and the third note of each group falls behind. Rather than repeating the whole passage faster and hoping, I would ask you to try two different thumb crossings or two fingerings for those notes, and record each attempt on your phone. Then we listen back together and look for the exact point where the sound breaks. It is usually one crossing, not the whole passage. Once we know where it falls apart, we isolate only that transition, practice it as a small loop of four or five notes, and bring it back into the piece. This works just as well for a teenager working through their first Burgmüller study as for an adult learning a Chopin nocturne, because the question is always the same: where exactly does this stop working?

I also separate the hands and the sound on purpose. Many students can play a piece hands together but cannot make the melody stand out above the accompaniment. For intermediate players, I often start by removing one hand and playing the melody alone with a deliberately uneven touch, so the top line is clearly audible. Then we add the chords back and compare: does the melody still come through, or does it disappear under the left hand? Rhythm gets the same treatment. If a Bach invention keeps tripping over itself in the middle, I may have you tap the rhythm on the lid of the piano while the left hand stays silent, so the timing is settled before the notes are asked to do anything else. Beginners and children can do this too, starting with one note and a simple clapped pattern, which is often the first time the idea of a melody makes physical sense.

The aim is for you to need me less over time. At the end of each lesson, we choose two comparisons to repeat during the week and write them down in your own words, such as "the thumb sounds rounder when the wrist drops after the note, not before," or "the run falls apart at the third group." At the next lesson, we start with those notes rather than a fresh list of exercises. Teenagers and adults preparing for a performance usually like this clear structure, while children often respond better to a simple game with a clear goal at the end. Either way, you leave each session knowing what to listen for, which is the part of practice most people are never taught.

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  • US$55

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  • 5h: US$275
  • 10h: US$550

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