Piano Lessons in Portland, OR
At Backbeat’s face-to-face piano lessons in Portland, OR or online, our piano teachers will start with what you want to be able to do, we’ll show you the skills that are the easiest and give you the most benefit the soonest. Our teachers will leverage the student’s interests to teach them the key skills that they’ll need to go wherever their interests take them to next.
All our piano teachers are multi-instrumentalists, so you’ll be able to explore other instruments, such as the drums, bass, ukulele and guitar in your piano lessons in Portland as well. You can explore them online as well, but you’ll need your own instruments.
Click Here to Schedule Your Free Trial Piano Lesson
What You Will Learn
Our piano teachers target the easiest, most useful skills first to make sure our students get off to a fast start. This way they are able to play the songs they want to sooner than they thought possible. For a beginner, this means learning the notes on the keyboard, how to play basic melodies and chords, how to play with other musicians and just enough music theory to get you started.
However, music is more than the notes. Students will also learn:
- Learning Skills: Playing music is easy – if you know what to do! This is why understanding directions is so important. Reading staff notation is a key part(sorry!), but only a part. The process of figuring out what you need to know is the single most important element of our music lessons. It is critical in defusing confusion and intimidation, the real bugbears of fast learning and low self-efficacy. Besides, great learners make great musicians
- Autonomy: Figuring out the directions only a start. It is like following a recipe. Ultimately, however, great music isn’t about playing the right notes in the right order – it is about connection.
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- Learning Skills: Great learners make great musicians. One of the founding principles of Backbeat’s teaching method is that if you explain to the student what the teacher is doing and why, then they learn faster. We teach our students the same teaching techniques that we teach our teachers and walk them through the steps in every lesson. This way, the student begins to learn how to sort out what needs to be done and how to use the mental tools required to do it best.
- Physical Skills: Playing the piano is fundamentally athletic, so we make sure our students understand the movements required to press the keys as well as proper posture and the fundamentals of good movement.
- Performance Skills: Thinking about what you are doing during a performance is a great way to underperform. Our piano lessons are designed to teach our students how to handle performance anxiety and tips and tricks to direct their attention in ways that will aid their performance instead.
- Musical Skills: When students understand how music works, they can hear what’s going on in any music they listen to and they can see how a song is built. This insight allows them to learn and memorize far faster than they could without it and facilitates songwriting, improvisation and understanding how to play in a group.
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Social Skills: Music is shared. In order to play effective music, a piano player must know what what they are doing, but also tune in to both fellow band members and the audience.
Who Is The Ideal Student
Our staff is great at teaching everyone, from those who have never lifted the lid on a piano, to advanced level students who wish to pursue music as a career. In short, it doesn’t matter what your ability level is because here at Backebeat Music Academy we have got something to offer all levels of ability. For kids younger than 7, check out our band programs for designed for young kids. We can do private lessons, but this might be a better option for them.
Our Philosophy
We know through extensive experience that playing music with other people –either in recitals or with bands– gives students the highest levels of enjoyment. It also gives a real sense of accomplishment. This is essential for self-motivation when learning how to play. In addition to focusing on the individual instrument of your choice, we also focus on performances.
Music Is Fun. Rule number one in our lessons is that music is fun. Why? Three big reasons. First, music itself is fun and if you aren’t having fun while playing music, then you’re doing it wrong. We don’t want our students to develop bad habits, so we make sure that all our students remain musical – and that means having fun.
Second, great learners make great musicians. in order to get to where they want to go, our students need to have good learning technique so they can learn faster. The brain learns best while playing, so if the student is having fun, then they are able to learn faster. Third, happy students are motivated students.
Third, the biggest problem with music lessons isn’t talent, and it isn’t motivation. The biggest problem in music lessons is intimidation. If a student feels inwardly that they won’t be able to succeed (research says this is the rule, not the exception), then they won’t be in a state of mind where they can learn fast. By making sure the student is having fun while knocking out critical skills, we level up our student to the point where they start to understand music and feel like it is something they could do.
Music is meant to be shared. Taking private lessons and never playing music with others is like dribbling a soccer ball around your house but never playing in a game. It misses the point of music, which is connection. This is the heart of music and the source for most of the real fulfillment in music-making.
People do what they think will work. The effectiveness of your choices depends on the accuracy of your assumptions. We teach this to our students because it empowers them with the single most effective way to improve their performance. Each action is a choice, and the best way to change your action is to change your choices. The best way to change your choices is to change the assumptions those choices were based on.
Our teachers use this insight to observe why a student is making a mistake, backtracking their choices to figure out the student’s assumptions. This allows the teacher to direct the student to the most effective way to improve, short-circuiting wasted practice time and much frustration. After all, music is meant to be fun.
Who Are Our Piano Teachers
Backbeat’s piano teachers all have extensive education and performance history. They’ve got music degrees from prestigious schools like Berklee and performed nationally with people such as B.B. King and the Portland Symphony. Most importantly, they are all dedicated teachers who are trained to give the best education and experience possible.
Prices for Piano Lessons in Portland, OR
Backbeat Music offers an easy flat-rate packages for piano lessons. Lessons are scheduled per month, so you get 4 or 5 lessons. We also offer unlimited rescheduling. Makeup lessons can be used on any instrument with any teacher.
A Calendar Month of weekly 30 Minute Lessons: 159/month
A Calendar Month of weekly 45 Minute Lessons: 219/month
A Calendar Month of weekly 60 Minute Lessons: 299/month
A Single 30 Minute Lesson: $42/each
A Single 60 Minute Lesson: $74/each
What You Should Do Next
Simply call/text us at (503) 290-5090 or click the button below to schedule a free trial lesson.