For most of my teaching career, the range of students I could reach was determined by driving distance. If you lived within a reasonable drive of my studio, we could work together. If you didn’t, you were limited to whatever teachers happened to be nearby — and for a great many people, especially those in small towns and rural areas, that meant no qualified piano teacher at all.
That constraint is gone. Today I teach dedicated piano students wherever they live, and the lesson they receive is not a lesser version of an in-person lesson. In several important ways, it is a better one.
The problem online teaching had to solve
I started teaching online more than fifteen years ago, well before it became commonplace. My first online students were people I already taught in person — families with second homes, professionals who traveled for work, students who moved away and didn’t want to start over with someone new. They didn’t want to lose continuity, and neither did I.
Those early lessons taught me what was missing. A single camera pointed at a piano gives you almost nothing. You can’t see the student’s hand shape. You can’t see the pedal. Compressed audio flattens dynamics into mush, so the difference between a real pianissimo and a timid one disappears entirely. And when you want to show a student something, you’re stuck describing it in words instead of demonstrating it.
Every piece of my current setup exists to solve one of those problems.
Four cameras, because one is never enough
When we’re in a lesson together, you see me from four separate camera angles, and I switch between them depending on what I’m teaching.
Overhead, looking down at the keys. This is the view that matters most for fingering. When I want you to see exactly which finger goes where in a tricky passage, this camera shows it unambiguously — no guessing, no “I think that was your third finger.”
From the side of the keyboard. Hand position, wrist height, arm weight, the shape of the hand as it moves through a phrase. These are things you cannot see from above, and they’re the difference between playing that sounds effortful and playing that sounds easy.
On the pedals. Pedaling is one of the most under-taught aspects of piano playing, largely because it’s so hard to see. A dedicated pedal camera makes half-pedaling, syncopated pedaling, and clean releases something I can demonstrate rather than merely describe.
On me. Because teaching is a conversation, and a conversation needs a face. This is where we talk about the music, discuss goals for the week, and where you can see that I’m delighted when something clicks.
On your end, you position your tablet or computer to the side of your piano so I can see both you and your keyboard. That single angle, in my experience, gives me everything I need to watch how you play.
Audio that respects what you’re actually playing
Video-call audio is engineered for speech. It assumes anything that isn’t a human voice is background noise to be suppressed, and it compresses dynamic range aggressively so that everyone sounds roughly equally loud. That is exactly the wrong behavior for a piano lesson.
I teach using professional audio equipment and settings configured specifically for music, not conversation. The result is that when I demonstrate a phrase, you hear the actual tone — the shading between voices, the difference between a pedaled and un-pedaled release, the way a melody line can float above an accompaniment. And when you play for me, I hear what you’re really doing, not a processed approximation of it.
This matters more than most people expect. Tone production is teachable, but only if both people can hear it.
The screen becomes a teaching tool
Here is where online lessons genuinely surpass sitting side by side at one instrument.
When we study a piece, I can put my copy of the score on screen and annotate it live while you watch. Fingerings, phrase markings, dynamic reminders, the spot where you keep rushing — all of it written down as we discuss it, in front of you, rather than shouted over your shoulder while you try to remember it.
I teach from both acoustic and electronic instruments, and I use piano education software that lets me illustrate theory concepts, show how a harmonic progression is built, or isolate a rhythm and slow it down until it makes sense. In a traditional lesson, these things live on a whiteboard you never see again. In our lessons, they’re on screen and they’re recordable.
After every lesson, you receive a written summary with specific practice recommendations for the week. If a passage gave you trouble, I’ll often record it and send it along so you have a model to listen to while you practice. Nobody leaves a lesson trying to reconstruct from memory what they were supposed to work on.
What “anywhere in the world” actually means
We meet at the same time each week, for a full hour, coordinating across our time zones so the lesson lands somewhere convenient for you. You sit at your own piano — your instrument, your bench height, your room — which is where you’ll be doing all your practicing anyway. There’s no drive, no weather, no rushing from work or school to make it on time.
My students include children and octogenarians, absolute beginners and returning adults who studied years ago and want to pick it back up. Some live in places where finding a qualified teacher would mean an hour each way in the car. Some simply prefer learning at home. What they have in common is that they’re serious about making progress.
I built this teaching practice on four decades of in-person experience, and I designed every part of it around a single question: what does a student actually need to see, hear, and take away from an hour at the piano? The technology isn’t the point. It’s just what finally made the answer possible from more than a few miles away.
Interested in studying with me? Send me an email and we’ll set up a conversation to talk about your goals.