AMANDA J  

5

  5.0 (21)

Instruments: Piano, Guitar, Voice, Flute, Bass Guitar, Ukulele, Mandolin, Recorder, Keyboard, Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar
Styles: Classical, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Blues, Folk, Country, R&B, Gospel, Musical Theater, Latin, Funk, Hip Hop, Electronic, Salsa, Showtunes, Spirituals, Reggae, Merengue, Latin Jazz, Swing, New Age, Samba, Bossa Nova, Soul, Marching Band, Punk, Avant-garde

Since I became aware of my destiny to be a music educator, I observed all of my music and general education teachers so that I could be better prepared for taking on students sooner. At 15 years old, I started taking on private students for flute so that after dabbling in music retail during college, I had a full roster of private students for piano and guitar as well by the time I was 21. By the time I was 24 years old, I had 60+ private students every week and included bass as one of my lesson and professional performance instruments. With music education in schools all around the Los Angeles area, I taught every kind of music class imaginable from preschool up through high school. Professional developments through many of the non-profits that I worked with provided me with additional skills in Bloom's taxonomy with lesson and curriculum planning, classroom management, teaching to the different styles of learners (visual, audio, kinesthetic, observational, etc.), and school subject integration. This has also allowed me to provide professional developments for classroom teachers to incorporate with their lessons for their students of all levels. These skills I also apply to my private lessons to customize for one-on-one students so they get the most out of their musical learning. A great music educator is constantly pushing their learning and educational skills through training in the professional music field and teacher developments. Learning to be flexible and improvise, as a musician AND a teacher, allows for life's interruptions to not be disruptive to a student's process!

For all instruments, I teach students to utilize ALL resources available to them, such as the Internet for finding sheet music with specific websites, YouTube for instructional videos and karaoke, tablets and phones for metronomes and tuners, and different ways to learn music through all of their technological devices that go beyond typical music notation. Students are given incentives for practice through a system of 5 A's in a row: if they achieve this goal, they get to choose whatever song they learn next. Music is then customized to incorporate their current skill levels with the challenges that bring them into the next. All instruments, including voice, learn the Major and minor scales with other scales being reserved for more advanced students. Repertoire will be centered around the scales the student is currently learning. SPECIFIC INSTRUMENT METHODS: GUITAR, MANDOLIN, and UKULELE-starting out with simple TABs to focus on parts of the instrument, body and hand positions, and utilizing the ear to hear rhythms within the internalized beat. Progress to rhythm notation over more challenging TABs, power chords, and open chords. From there, rhythm notation is applied to strumming with more complex rhythms using ties, as well as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, and bends on TAB notation. For those interested in learning to read music notes on the staff, Mel Bay method and custom well-known melodies I notate personally are provided. PIANO-beginning with note names on piano with note-name notation that utilizes rhythms by rote (by ear) to establish internalized rhythm, body and hand positions, and finger positions. Alfred's Basic Piano method or Bastien Piano method levels are determined for the student after assessing how they did with the first part in order to learn music notation with notes on the staff and rhythms. Customized melodies for their rewards always utilizes note-name and/or music notation. Once students are ready for the challenge of changing positions, Hanon exercises 1-5 are introduced. VOICE-establishing good habits of breathing from the diaphragm, relaxing the throat, and utilizing air to sing instead of "hit" the note starts out our vocal lessons. Warm-ups using scale degree numbers and syllables with steps, skips, and controlled scooping eventually progress to solfege and harmonies. For repertoire, enunciation is a crucial habit that naturally makes the voice louder and words easily understood, and pieces are chosen collaboratively by myself and the student so that they are challenging but not discouraging. If students are interested in specific singing genres, such as Pop, Rock, Musical Theater, or Jazz, we then focus on techniques for those styles. BASS-much like the guitar except instead of chords, students are taught walking bass lines with 12-bar blues and progress to using chord notation to write their own walking bass lines. Berklee Bass Method is used for notation reading, as well as Jamey Aebersold for the jazz-minded. FLUTE-the hardest thing to do on flute is get the initial sound. Once that's done, the rest starts to fall in place! Body position and proper breathing techniques are taught with sound production, reading fingering charts for G, A, and B get the student started on simple 3-note melodies, applying the notes they learn to simple music notation as they learn more notes, and then getting into the Rubank method to challenge their music reading and finger combinations for notes.