Oclef Blog

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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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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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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November 02, 2018

Why are there levels for students learning piano?

First of all, for those wondering, these levels are all made up. Some group of people decided a while back to start categorizing pieces by difficulty and then organizing them into 10 levels. Level 1 is the easiest and 10 the hardest.

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October 09, 2016

Can video recording change music education? (Part I of III)

The feedback loop is one of the most fascinating aspects of learning. It’s a simple, but powerful process that happens hundreds of millions of times in our life. We learn We change We improve It’s this process and the forces that live in and between it, that decide how far we go. A passion and curiosity for learning, an openness to change, and a persistence to improve, these are all parts of that process. So last year when I came across a Clavier Companion article from one our early Oclef sig...

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