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Master Degree: University of Oklahoma
You will almost certainly appreciate my teaching style, because you are the one who is learning to play music, so my teaching must be about you. I have enjoyed music my entire life, and playing music is even more fun than listening to it. If you are starting out from the beginning, or someone with past experience but you haven't played in a long time, or someone who is starting music later in life, we can find together a way for you too add such a beautiful thing as performing music to your life.
To help you find the beauty and enjoyment in playing music, I will use all of my experience teaching, which includes not only music but mathematics and science. I have taught these two in classrooms and as a private tutor for 15 years. I have taught music primarily to more advanced musicians who were struggling to grow as musicians, and had reached a point where they felt they could not move any further forward. But this is where I thrive because I very much enjoy helping people get unstuck. But I'm also happy to teach new people, because this will set you on the road to some experiences that you would not have otherwise which are some of the best a human can have.
Whether you are beginning in music or experienced, I will design a program for you. We will start with a short time where we get to know each other. Then we can choose a music book for saxophone that we can work out of. For example for beginners we can start with the Hal Leonard Essential Elements book. (But don't let using a book frighten you, because we will have as much fun as we can learning music.) One important thing I want to mention is that I personally, although I have been singing and playing music for nearly 40 years, practicing has been very difficult for me. Yet I am still a professional musician. What I am saying is that you can be successful in learning to be a musician if you have attention issues. As a middle-aged adult I have (just a few years ago) been diagnosed with ADHD, which explains my entire life of practicing music! I am not a psychologist, but I know how it feels and I have studied enough teaching and psychology to understand that things like this are not a permanent barrier to being a musician, even a great musician. We work with what we have. So if you have issues like this, don't let them stop you from enjoying music in the best way possible: playing it!
You are going to enjoy music more than you have before after we work together. My focus is you, the student. You will not leave my lesson with your shoulders up around your ears because you are tense from the difficult lesson. You will encounter difficulty, but my style of teaching is to show you that you can do it. We will learn fundamentals and rules of music, but these are necessary to make the music sound more beautiful. Imagine a game in sports—pick your favorite sport—and think about what would happen if there were no rules, no referees, no time limits, no boundaries on the field. The game would never actually happen, which would be absolutely no fun at all, right? So we will learn the rules of the game and you will find pretty music coming out of your instrument. You will know it by the sound of it, but I'll be sure to let you know when I hear it as well.