New Finds for Piano Lessons!

Is everyone busy gearing up for a new year of piano lessons? I am in brainstorming season right now as I develop lesson plans for each student, select repertoire that I hope they will love, and create a new practice incentive theme for the piano studio. There are a couple of fabulous new resources that I’ve recently come across that I wanted to share:

In one of Tim Topham’s recent podcasts, he interviewed Rock Out Loud Live founder, Mike Grande, about his virtual music lesson portal that he designed specifically for virtual music lessons as an alternative to Zoom or other popular online portals that are more suited to presentations than music lessons. He makes no bones about his desire to overtake the Zoom market  with his website I Killed Zoom that provides sound demos for comparison. I haven’t had a chance to try it out with a lesson yet, but I’m so excited to use a portal that won’t think that a student playing the piano is background noise that should be filtered out!

Jerald Simon is one of those people who is impossible to keep up with because he’s constantly developing new ideas, composing new music, crafting new ways to effectively motivate and teach piano students to play well, and so on. His latest project, a course titled Essential Piano Exercises, looks incredibly well-done and like a great addition way for any pianist to gain a working knowledge of music theory that they can use right away to improvise fluently at the piano. Improvisation has been a long-sought after skill in my own journey as a pianist, and I would have loved to have something like this to learn from as a high school student who was still struggling to understand what it meant to play in a given key!

Finally, this is a book that I’ve had sitting on my shelves for years, and I think I’m finally going to use it this year! Great Music and Musicians: An Overview of Music History is a beautifully designed book with accompanying CD that I think will be perfect for my monthly group class that will be all high school students this year. If anyone else has used it, I’d love to know what you and/or your students think of it!

Also, have you found any other great or new resources that you’re planning to use this year, whether for virtual or in-person piano lessons? I’m eager to squeeze as much as I can out of these next several weeks of brainstorming!

Please note: Some links above are affiliate links that enable us to receive a small commission from purchases made through them. We only recommend those that we find valuable for teaching and studio use. We are so grateful for the support of teachers and musicians who use our affiliate links to help offset the costs of running Music Matters Blog and providing free resources for music teachers!