Hey everyone, I’m new to these forums but am a long time contributor to r/piano and r/pianolearning over on Reddit. I believe in a synthesis of jazz and classical training to form versatile well rounded musicians who are ready to function at a high level in college and the music industry.
One thing that I’ve noticed after almost 20 years of teaching is the severe lack of pianist specific rhythm training. This seems pretty crazy since percussion is one of the categories that the piano falls under.
One thing that initially drew me to this historically was my own personal lack of rhythm early on. Growing up it seemed like an after thought to most teachers, you were either lucky and just naturally understood rhythm or not. I clearly struggled with rhythm but no teacher ever thought, ‘hey, maybe we should take some time to do some dedicated rhythm training?’ I don’t fault them for this, because it’s truly (and sadly) not a common thing piano teachers do. There are no popular methods… yet! It wasn’t until college when I finally started cornering my percussion friends and digging into their training material like, ‘Stick Control’, ‘Syncopation’, and ‘The Language of Drumming’.
These texts really helped me, but I could see how these curriculums could be tailored to suite the needs of pianists better. So I spent the past 10 years using my students as test subjects to do just that, and developed my method called, ‘Rhythm Training for Pianists’.
I use this method at the beginning of every lesson as a 5-15 minute warm up that I do with my students. We explore coordination, syncopation at all levels of subdivision, the metronome, realtime mistake management and more before we ever touch the piano.
I’ve found that when these foundational skills are developed away from the piano, it makes it so much easier to then sit down at the piano and tackle the challenges of 10 fingers and 88 keys.
I’ve also discovered that anyone can be taught rhythm. Most people, even the ones like me who think they are ‘bad’ at rhythm are actually pretty close to average. But even the rare students who are truly deficient in rhythm aptitude due to neurodivergence can be taught rhythm with my method given enough time, patience, and encouragement.
As an elder millennial I benefited so much from the multitude of free knowledge that the internet provided me and making this material available to the world is my form of giving back.
Here is a link to the play along playlist of my Rhythm Training for Pianists curriculum. I’d love to discuss it with anyone who is interested, whether you are a student trying to learn rhythm or a teacher who is looking for a method to help students. Lets discuss!
