Jon Zilber
About
Quickstart approach to playing piano -- many students are playing songs in their first lesson.
Experienced players learn new approaches to advance much more quickly and start playing how they've always wanted to play.
Teaching Style
Every student is different. What comes easily to you? What's hard? And, most imporantly, what do you want to get out of your lessons? Every lesson is customized for you.
I've been playing since I was a kid. I started with traditional classical piano and music theory. As a teenager, I realized I was more interested in learning to play Elton John than Mozart, and started teaching myself how to play pop music and standards. I also started writing songs, and have written music and lyrics for a half a dozen musicals (produced for community theaters). I've also played keyboards and served as music director for community theater musicals.
Curriculum
With most students, the initial focus is on learning a few chords and a couple of rhythm patterns that you can use to quickly start playing hundreds of songs.
You'll learn how to add in "fills" -- like arpeggios, jazz chords, walking bass lines -- to enhance your playing.
And you'll learn one of the "dirty little secrets" of improvising -- how to turn "mistakes" into the best things you'll ever play.
If you read music, we'll work from a "fake book" of the kind of music you want to play. (You'll also learn why you can ignore half of everything you ever learned about reading music.)
If you don't want to learn to read music, we'll start by working with chord patterns.