PianEasy

Most people try to learn the piano in one-hour weekly lessons squeezed between work, family, and fatigue.  It’s no surprise progress feels glacial. You spend half the lesson trying desperately to remember what you almost learned the week before, then go home despondent and remedy the situation by doing zero practice all week except to squeeze in a distracted “session” the night before the following lesson, and the cycle repeats until eventually you’re left no option but to mistakenly conclude it’s not for you – you must be lacking the requisite talent, best just accept it maybe and move on to knots and life as a 19th century sailor.

Immersive learning breaks that cycle and instead accelerates everything.  It represents the cheat code that unlocks retention and profound progress regarding acquiring any new skill, and it’s the bullseye with respect to the conception and implementation of these retreats.  When practice becomes your environment rather than a task squeezed into the day, clarity and fluency grow much more rapidly, the resulting progress observable after only a few days of immersion often far exceeds months at home simply because the distractions of everyday life get temporarily cast aside, and you get to enter into a rhythm where practice is all you have to do and all you have to think about.  Surrounded by music all day in this way, you and the others learning alongside you find your attention sharpening, your shoulders loosening, and all of a sudden what once felt extremely challenging becomes surprisingly attainable.

Some of the reasons immersive learning works so well:

1. You’re building momentum instead of losing it

Skills that normally fade between weekly lessons instead stay warm and get warmer, and warmer.  Connections strengthen, and with prolonged engaged concentration comes those meditative and flow states-of-mind where time ceases to exist, only music…

2. Time to repeat…

Instead of finding time to practice, you have time.  Instead of 99% intention to 1% activity: “I must try to apply this later,” you actually just apply it for the 99% – return and again – return and again – return and again – until autopilot & flow kicks in and the real fun begins!

3. You experience music as a natural form of self-expression

Just as learning a language feels more natural and is radically faster when surrounded by it from dawn til dusk, so learning anything accelerates and feels at home when you’re surrounded by it, engaging with it, experimenting with it all day every day.

4. You’re supported at exactly the right moments

Guidance comes when the question is alive and current – not a week later once your momentum is already days ago.  THIS way momentum is fanned until its flames burn bright instead of allowing it to repeatedly peter out week after week.  THIS way breakthroughs arrive quicker inspiring further commitment and perseverance.  THIS way the virtuous circle gets born which ends with you as pianist-in-chief in the event of any emergency.

5. Learning with others helps fuel motivation.

Watching others learn beside you, dueting, exchanging discoveries—it builds motivation and extra momentum that you simply can’t tap into when you learn alone at home.

6. You leave with habits, strategies, and access to an ever growing library of repertoire, not just a simple ditty or two.

This period of focussed immersion with expert support offers you an approach and a strategy that you can take to any number of pieces/repertoire that you will find populating the ever-expanding PianEasy Library, so you can take your momentum home, enter the “Atomic” regime, and continue fanning the flames from there.  The online repository of related tutorials will also serve as at-home-reminders to retreat participants of everything covered:  how to practice strategically; how to avoid common traps; the A,B,C’s – all the way to G#s – of Scales and Chords, and all the while learning real pieces you actually like, allowing you to gradually build repertoire and sustain progress and confidence, all while having actual fun from the outset!  Madness.