Oclef Blog

January 31, 2026

How Piano E-Sports Changed the Way Our Students Practice

At the 15th League of Legends World Championship, T1 won their sixth world title. This result was not an accident. The team earned it through countless hours of practice, where players refined mechanics and strategy again and again. Reaction speed, endurance, and focus all mattered. At this level, even a small mistake can decide the match. I stayed up late to watch the live stream and cheer for the players. While watching, I kept thinking about piano learning. I wondered what would happen if...

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January 29, 2026

Beyond Counting and Mimicry: A Visual Approach to Rhythm

I strongly disagree that this is the only way students can learn what the rhythm sounds like. While counting is the ultimate goal for musical literacy, demanding it too early can be a barrier. Mimicry, on the other hand, creates dependency. I proposed a third way—a visual tool I call Rhythm Sets. The Visual Rhythm Set Method

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December 23, 2025

How Oclef Lessons Differ from Traditional Lessons

I’m sitting at the desk in my house on a cold December morning. To my right is my electric Korg keyboard and in front of me sits my desk and computer. It’s a very different setup than when I started teaching back in 2004. In the early days of teaching, I sat next to my students at my parents’ Baldwin upright piano as the student played. Today, I teach between 25-30 students daily from my home office, about to enter my 4th year as an Oclef instructor. Over these past four years, I’ve thought l...

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December 16, 2025

When Will My Child Be Ready to Play Longer Pieces?

When Will My Child Be Ready to Play Longer Pieces? This question I've been asked in recent conversation with a parent whose child is currently in stage 1 piano learning. Conversations like these often reveal a gap in understanding how piano skills are truly built especially with young students. At recitals, parents see some students perform beautiful, expressive pieces that last five or six minutes. What’s easy to overlook is the journey behind those performances. Many of those students have...

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December 12, 2025

Beyond Solo Practice: Why Ensemble Playing Matters for Young Pianists

Music is fundamentally a social art form — it brings people together to listen, sing, and move. Yet for many piano students, music-making becomes a solitary endeavor: meeting 1-on-1 with a teacher, practicing alone, and playing solo in concerts or studio recitals. Compared with a trombonist who plays in the school band or a violinist who plays in a youth orchestra, a young pianist encounters few opportunities to make music as part of an ensemble.

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December 11, 2025

My Experience as a First Oclef Apprentice: Growing Through the Apprentice Program

When I began the Apprentice Program at Oclef nine months ago, I had no idea how deeply it would reshape the way I approach teaching. I had already spent years studying piano intensively both in New Zealand and USA as well as teaching in a variety of settings from private lessons to group and classroom teaching at the Jacob’s School of Music in Indiana, but never tried teaching online or worked with young children. So back in March when I started my journey, I was feeling a bit apprehensive ab...

December 08, 2025

Beyond the Notes: Celebrating Courage and Growth in Neurodivergent Students

For many years, I taught piano to neurotypical children. But I always felt drawn to teaching neurodivergent students—not because of their learning style, but because it felt natural to me. I knew there are many neurodivergent students out there, yet I rarely heard of teachers welcoming them. I often asked myself: Why aren’t more teachers working with these kids? Why isn’t music education more accessible to them?

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August 18, 2025

From Online to In-Person: The Power of Piano Summer Camp

Every day, I teach piano online to student across the country. Students log in from their homes, and together we learn how to play piano, explore music theory, practice technique, and celebrate progress. But once a year, something truly special happens—I fly from my home in Florida to California to join Oclef for a Week of Piano Summer Camp in person.

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August 07, 2025

What Parents Know About Piano Lessons, What Piano Teachers Don’t, and Oclef’s Way

They don’t know that there are options outside of the traditional one-hour-a-week lesson. They don’t know how to provide more performance opportunities for their students. They know that the best learning happens when focus is applied daily, but do not have the resources to ensure practice is happening outside of the lesson.

July 11, 2025

What Makes a Great Managing Professor? From Teacher to Leader

In most piano schools, teachers teach and that’s where the story ends. But at our school in Oclef, we’re building something deeper—a system where the best teachers grow into leaders. We call them Managing Professors. These aren’t just people who’ve taught a while. They’re the ones who’ve earned the opportunity to develop other teachers. It’s a kind of micro-franchise. You’ve proven you can teach. Now you get the chance to lead. The shift from teacher to Managing Professor is a big one. Most ...

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July 02, 2025

Forget Work-Life Balance: The Secret Playbook of Parents Who Win at Work and Home

Let’s start with a brutal truth: Work-life balance isn’t just broken. It never existed. We’ve all heard the advice, juggle better, find the perfect split, keep the seesaw level. The problem? Life isn’t a seesaw. It’s a high-stakes, multi-level chess match: kids, work, health, marriage, ambition...moving in real time. If you’re waiting for “balance,” you’re already losing ground. Here’s what the data shows: • 57% of working parents are burned out (Ohio State University, 2024). • Up to 70% of f...

June 23, 2025

Let Them Be Bored: Why Doing “Nothing” Is the Best Thing You Can Give a Child This Summer

Most of us scramble for solutions. But what if these “empty” moments are where real growth begins? The Case for Boredom (Backed by Brain Science) “I’m bored!” It’s the line every parent dreads, and our reflex is to fill the silence. But if you look at the latest research, and listen to what leading child psychologists are saying, boredom isn’t a crisis to solve. It’s a cognitive compost pile, the dark, quiet space where imagination, resilience, and self-motivation quietly take root. ABC’s Go...

June 07, 2025

How Digital Twins and Neuroscience Are Changing the Game in K-12 Education

What if every child’s learning journey came with a user manual? Thanks to a fusion of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, we’re now closer than ever to understanding exactly how each student learns best and how to help them thrive, no matter where they start. In a world where most classrooms still rely on one-size-fits-all methods, this shift isn’t just a technological upgrade, it’s a revolution in how we value every child’s mind. As Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a leader in cognitive neur...

May 23, 2025

Unmute, Share, Edit: 3 Attitudes for Performing

I recently discovered a few of my students only practice with their piano on mute. They do not want to ‘bother’ other family members with the sound of works in progress. This reluctance to play for others started a valuable conversation about the role of performing in music study. Music is an interactive experience, so it is important to unmute ourselves and share our playing even when we feel like it can still improve. Here are three attitudes towards performing I learned to cultivate for my...

May 22, 2025

Jazzing It Up

🎹 Jazzing It Up and Breaking Free From Traditional Song Learning In today’s online piano lesson, I had the joy of working with one of my Oclef students on the exciting piano duet Cool Walking Bass from the Piano Adventures Method Book 3A. This piece is more than just fun—it’s a great introduction to blues and jazz styles, offering students a first taste of swing rhythm, walking bass lines, mordents and syncopation. To deepen the learning experience, we took the lesson a step further by com...

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May 20, 2025

Unlocking Expression: Online Piano Lesson Spotlight – 'Sword Dance' from Piano Adventure Level 2A

Today I would like to showcase one of my Oclef students as we are practicing on “Sword Dance” from the Piano Adventures Method Book 2A. This piece introduces important musical concepts such as allegro tempo, fermata, and expressive dynamics including crescendo and diminuendo. This blog post also highlights the value of listening a full music score to enhance students' ear training, sense of mood, and overall musicality.

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May 08, 2025

How to Understand and Speak Music Theory Language - Teaching Chords

Ever feel like music theory is a confusing puzzle that never quite fits the song you're learning? What if the key to mastering your next piece isn't just more practice—but actually understanding the chords behind the notes? In this post, I’ll show you how starting with one simple theory concept—primary chords in a key (I-IV-V7)—can completely transform the way piano students learn and play music. Before diving into any new piece, I always make it a point to start with music theory. Why? Be...

April 29, 2025

Teach What Most Teachers Miss

This next-level Oclef Notation tutorial dives into three essential moves every beginner needs—but few are ever taught well: stretches beyond the basic five-finger frame, folds that reshape the hand mid-phrase, and jumps that navigate the keyboard with control and confidence. These aren’t just technical fixes—they’re foundational patterns. And once you learn how to notate them, your students will stop guessing and start feeling the right motion. Whether you're in Kaizen or running your own stu...

April 29, 2025

The Missing Link in Piano Teaching — Fixed.

Oclef Notation isn't just a better way to mark music. It's a visual system that turns confusing movements into clear, teachable steps. Most beginners don’t naturally connect sheet music to what their hands need to do — and that disconnect slows everything down. In this quick video, we’ll show you how to bridge that gap by marking crossovers, pivots, and shifts on the score itself. It’s like giving your students a GPS for their fingers. Whether you're inside a Kaizen session or leading your ow...

April 27, 2025

Introducing piano-finger.8va.co

We are happy to announce the release of piano-finger.8va.co. Piano-Finger generates optimal fingering for any piece of piano music. It is free for everyone. Link to the source code is on the website.

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April 21, 2025

Oclef - Open Source

Oclef's Commitment to Community: Open Sourcing for a Better Future Innovation is the key to growth and transformation. At Oclef, we want to harness this power for our own growth, but also want to elevate the entire piano education community. Our belief in innovation has been the driving force behind the recent decision to open source our code on GitHub. By making our technology accessible to all, we hope to foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and shared success. Why Open Source? Op...

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January 17, 2025

The Conservatory and the Private School: Observations from Working in Two School Models

If you are a conservatory trained musician like me, then your coursework, lessons, and curriculum were designed to prepare you for an academic job. Of course, a musician’s life is rarely a straight line from graduation to tenure-track employment. In fact, a variety of factors have made securing a full-time academic position today more difficult than ever:

November 25, 2024

Oclef Contemporary Music Fesitval

Have you ever imagined trying something completely outside your normal routine? Something that pushes you out of your comfort zone—only to discover you can do it without falling flat on your face? Chances are, many of you have in one form or another! On Sunday, November 17th, I finally had the chance to see if a project we had been working on for months would come together. Sixteen pianists (age 10-17) from Oclef and Bay Area, joined by members of the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, shared the ...

October 09, 2024

An Innovation To The Piano Recital

What is World Music? The question seems simple enough on its surface, however once you begin answering you may find it difficult to convey what it really means. That is because we think of World Music as a genre, one that you could go to a record store and find as a section between Banda and Spoken Word. Despite its name, World Music as a genre encompasses little of the world’s total music. Indeed, if it really was a catalog of “all the world’s music”, the term would be useless.

July 10, 2024

Unlocking Potential: How Oclef's Stage 4 Students Are Redefining Education Through Passion and Purpose

🎧 Listen to this Blog In the 21st century, education is undergoing a metamorphosis. No longer is it sufficient to follow a linear path of study, graduate, and enter a predetermined career. Today's world demands creativity, adaptability, and a fusion of diverse skills. At Oclef, we're witnessing this transformation firsthand through our Stage 4 students—young visionaries who are leveraging their years of piano education to craft platforms that not only enrich their lives but also create value...

July 07, 2024

How to Help Your Child Love Piano: A Parent’s Guide Beyond Practice

As a long-time piano teacher at Oclef, I've seen the full range of emotions that kids bring to their piano lessons or to any learning, for that matter. Some walk in excited, fingers itching to play, while others sit reluctantly on the bench, waiting for the timer to go off. The question I often get from parents is, "How do I get my child to love piano, not just do it because I ask them to?" It's a tough one, and if you're a parent who's invested time, energy, and resources into your child's ...

July 04, 2024

The Digital Native's Dilemma: Balancing Screen Time with Real-World Skills

In 2010, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains sparked a debate that still rages today: how are digital technologies shaping our minds and lives? For today's children, the "digital natives," technology isn't just a tool—it's the water they swim in. At Oclef, we're navigating these waters daily, balancing the power of tech with the irreplaceable value of real-world skills. The average child now spends over seven hours a day in front of screens. It's a statisti...

July 01, 2024

Rethinking Screen Time: The Hidden Power of Active Digital Learning

In the world of parenting, few topics ignite more debate than screen time. It's the boogeyman of the digital age, blamed for everything from shortened attention spans to the decline of face-to-face social skills. But what if I told you that not all screen time is created equal? That, in fact, some forms of screen time could be the key to unlocking your child's potential? At Oclef, we've observed a fascinating phenomenon: the power of active digital learning, particularly in the realm of onli...

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June 28, 2024

The Piano Player's Secret: Turning Mistakes into Music

Imagine your child sitting at the piano, fingers poised over the keys. They start to play, and suddenly - oops! A wrong note. What happens next could make all the difference in their musical journey.

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June 25, 2024

“Dare to How”: Embracing Discomfort is the Key to Growth and Innovation

At Oclef, we believe that the path to excellence is paved with challenges. Our faculty members don't just teach music; they embody a philosophy of continuous growth and innovation that sets the tone for our entire organization. This approach isn't about being comfortable – it's about thriving in discomfort and using it as a catalyst for extraordinary achievement.

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