1) Music Lessons are a Great Extracurricular Activity: Music lessons are lots of fun, you can learn a creative skill, it can challenge your mind and body, and there aren’t limited to seasons. Music lessons are also far more affordable than many extracurricular activities.
2) Share Your Passion For Music: No one goes into teaching a musical instrument without feeling passionate about it. If you’re passionate about music, you and your music teacher will share that passion and enjoy the adventure of making beautiful music. There’s no buzzkill like finding out that your friends don’t care about what you’re interested in, but if you have a music teacher, you have someone who will share your love of music.
3) Learn Music Technic: Obviously, in private music lessons you will learn exercises, skills, tips, that are specific to the instrument. Any band or orchestra teacher can offer valuable insight for improving your skills as a musician, but for specific advice, you need private music lessons. A music teacher can help you improve your tone, fix fingerings, learn technique, and learn specific tools, exercises, and tricks to make you a better player.
4) They Know The Instrument: If you’re self-teaching and your instrument stops working, or you have troubles with it like out of tune, who do you go to? A music teacher could test out your instrument and determine whether it needs repair, services or replacement. If it's not bad, they can’t fix it themselves, they can get you to someone who can.
5) Get Valuable Information: A professional music teacher knows valuable information about the best brands, where to get a good instrument, what to look for, how to get your instrument repaired, how to care for it, where to get great music sheets, performance opportunities, etc. It’s definitely worth it to tap into this knowledge. If you’re looking to learn a specific song, bring it to the lesson and teacher will help you.
6) Accountability is an Excellent Motivator: Teachers always know whether you’ve done the work or not! And this is a GOOD thing, because it helps you be motivated to practice! Practice is what leads to progress. Knowing that every week you have a mini “performance” for your teacher is great motivation to be sure you’re doing your part. True story: Some kids in school band almost never played their instruments, and during performances, they would only pretend to play. Regular solo performances at weekly in private music lessons would eliminate any desire to fake playing with your ensemble.
7) One-on-one Attention vs Blending Into the Ensemble: If you’re learning instrument, you’re probably in a band or orchestra. We encourage all music students to join an ensemble because it’s a rewarding experience that teaches you things you simply can’t have it in one-on-one lessons. But the tradeoff is that in a large ensemble, you don’t get one-on-one attention, no body can hear you in details, no one fix your mistakes. In private lessons, you get 100% of the teacher’s focus to help you with your fingering, note-reading, tone, tune, time, breathing, and a million other things in details.
8) Performance Experience: If you’re not in an ensemble and you want to learn instrument anyway, chances are you don’t really have any places to perform. Music teacher is someone you can perform for or with on a regular basis, and most teachers hold recitals at which you could have a chance to perform. They should also be able to direct you to community or special ensemble groups that you could join when you are good enough.
9) Understand Your Music and Learn Music Theory: Many people who stop making music only quit because they didn’t understand it. Most ensemble conductors don’t teach a lot of music theory because
- they assume you already know it,
- they don’t know what you may or may not know, and
- they simply don’t have the time or means to teach it all with all the music you’re practicing.
In private lessons, you’ll learn music theory so that you can understand the music you’re trying to play.
10) They Know What It’s Like: Professional instructors know what it’s like to be in band and/or orchestra, which means we can offer insight that may help you! Our teachers spent a lot of years in various ensemble groups, and that experience allows them to help music students navigate the good and the bad.
11) Make Good Connections: Connecting with a flute teacher is your first great music connection! With your teacher’s help, you can learn all kinds of fun, high-quality music. You can also use them as a network to help you meet other talented music players and get involved in performing groups.
12) Take Advantage of An Extra Set of (Professionally Trained) Ears: An extra set of ears is always helpful because they hear the things you missed. An extra set of professionally trained ears on the head of a music teacher will catch all kinds of things you never could. Your music teacher will draw your attention to those things and help you improve where you didn’t even know you could.
13) Avoid Learning Bad Habits: Inevitably, self-taught musicians develop one or more bad habits and don’t find out until they’re taught by a good teacher. Bad habits have to be unlearned before the correct habits can be relearned, which seriously hampers your forward progress. Sometimes bad habits completely prevent any progress until they’re unlearned, and the whole “unlearning” process can mean a lot of extra time and frustration for you. With a good teacher, you learn the correct habits right from the start, and you won’t have to unlearn anything later.
14) Accelerate Your Progress: With regular one-on-one lessons, your progress will be much faster than it would be if you were self-teaching. The faster you learn, the better you’ll get and the sooner you’ll be able to perform and make even more beautiful music.
15) Music Lessons Make Playing Music Fun, Easy, and Rewarding: Private Music lessons can offer you the most rewarding and enjoyable experience with learning music! You’ll find out just how easy it is to be good at it, and you’ll quickly develop an even greater passion for making music with your beautiful instrument.
