Thousand Seasons Studio offer a high quality piano education to kids and adults of London who wish to learn the piano with non traditional piano lessons. Our piano courses are designed to unleash anyone’s creative potential not only as a pianist but above all as a music lover. We focus on teaching you tools that will help you to play freely the piano for the rest of your life and the music you love.
For beginners to advanced students
Our teaching philosophy is based on the fact that music works and can be taught like a language. Traditional piano lessons are mostly based on reading scores but as babies, we don’t read before we speak and this can also apply to music.
Our approach consists of taking the time to understand music, listen to it and develop skills around concepts and structures that will help you to really understand and play the piano forever instead of just learning pieces that you will forget if you don’t practise them.
Alternative to traditional lessons
Our piano lessons are designed to help all kind of students to succeed and reach dreams that they thought unattainable. Whether they are complete beginners or advanced amateur pianists, we will not only teach them how to gain confidence and express themselves freely on the piano but also how to create their own music, to play with others and how to record and release their pieces.
The joy of playing the piano freely and being creative is accessible to everyone with the right method and mindset. There is no need at all to have piano lessons since childhood and to belong to a musician family to be able to enjoy music as much as professionals do.
Who is it for ?
Nowadays there are so many different music genres like RnB, Reggae, Folk, HipHop, Neosoul, Rock, Blues and although each one of them has specific characteristic, we can distinguish 3 main styles that are the most influential over all others. Classical, Jazz and Pop.
You can choose to focus on one of these styles but we encourage our piano students to learn and practise all of them. Music is music and it is not meant to be divided into separated boxes.
What styles are taught?
OUR PIANO COURSES
Active and Passive learning approach
Nowadays, so many different kind of music exist and each one of us can listen to whatever we enjoy the most. But although the piano is used across all genres, it is still mostly taught with teaching approaches that only work very well for a small part of today's music.
Along with church and classical music that was taught in early music schools and academies, there have always been other genres of music like the blues transmitted orally by "uneducated" musicians.
Most today's popular music genres come from them and we can clearly distinguish 2 learning approaches. One still dominates most music lessons around the world although the other has a bigger creative potential.
VS
The "Passive" Approach
The "Active" Approach
This approach consists of learning how to repeat existing pieces of music by reading full music scores.
The goal of this approach is to learn how to create improvised or written music out of harmonies, rhythms, melodies.
Fast to learn your first pieces as you don’t need to understand how the music work.
Takes more time to get started into playing as you need to understand and learn musical structures.
Play only the pieces as they are written on scores. If a piece is too difficult, learn an other one instead.
Understand how to adapt, simplify or create variations of any pieces you play.
If you get used to play only with scores, you won’t be able to play without them.
No need of music scores to perform, it’s all in your brain and ears.
Play only someone else’s music
Write your own music or re-arrange someone else’s pieces.
Every new piece is a new work from the beginning. This is mostly noticeable with advanced pieces.
The more pieces you practise, the easier and faster it gets to learn new pieces.
Forget quickly the pieces you learned if you don’t play them regularly.
Memorise longer and it’s easy to find back forgotten pieces.
Need to rehearse before playing music with other musicians.
Jam spontaneously with other musicians even if you’ve never plaid with them before.
Learning to play the piano in an active way is very beneficial and even necessary for genres like pop, jazz and blues where you permanently needs to be creative and independent of scores.
On the contrary, doing music passively means that you only play what you can read.
We are not saying that reading scores is bad, we just believe it doesn’t have to be the main focus and the only way of learning music especially when you want to be creative.
“What approach is right for me?”
Your goals, music taste and the amount of work you are ready to invest are some factors that can help you decide which approach is the right for you. But that doesn’t mean that you have to choose one over the other. Both are compatible and we encourage you as well working on your creative potential as learning to respect a composer’s piece of art.
Our active teaching method
Our mission is to make sure you learn the tools to feel free and independent on the piano. To be able to sit and play whatever you want even after months without practising at all. Because once you learn the tools, you never forget them. And these tools will always help you find back forgotten pieces.
Every music from all over the world are divided into 3 main sections: The melody, the harmonies and the bass line. In order to achieve a musical freedom no matter what music you play, you need to understand how these sections work individually and how they interact with each other.
Here is a fragment of Mozart's very well known "Rondo Alla Turca". These would be the typical piano scores you would find in a book. Everything is written for the right AND the left hands.
Here is the same fragment of Mozart's piece but written as a "Lead sheet". These type of scores are mainly used in contemporary music.
Instead of reading all the notes for both hands, pianists just get the main melody. The letters are chords symbols that give enough information to create an accompaniment of the melody.
Lead sheets are the simplest version of a piece of music. It doesn't show exactly how the composition was originally plaid but the less information you have on scores, the faster you can read it and the more creative you can be.
We will teach you how to read such lead sheets, how to use chords, melodies, rhythms to create your own version of someone else's composition.
Below you can listen to the original version of Mozart's well known piece and compare it to 4 other versions arranged by one of our piano teachers.
These use the same melody but chords, rhythms and sometimes the melody itself are changed and adapted for different styles.
Original
Raggaton
Ballad
Bossa Nova
Pop
All of these versions have been plaid and arranged by one of our piano teachers
Our Pricing
Our offer for Kids are slightly different as they follow the school calendar.
Weekly lessons for only £166 per month!