About
Established in 2005
Why Try Success Music Studio?
Hi, I’m Geoff (pronounced Jeff) Keith and I am the owner of Success Music Studio and the author of the Successful Music Student Blog. I hope I can help you.
I have been teaching music lessons for over 35 years, over 25 years with LD and special needs students. Since I opened the studio, I have taught approximately 8,000 hours of LD and special needs lessons. This is like teaching eight hours a day, every day, for over two years.
Half my business also consists of typical learner students. During that time, I have logged around the same amount of experience with these students as well. However, I also have even more experience from my time teaching before Success Music Studio was founded.
About Success Music Studio Lessons
I didn’t start out trying to be a radical. When I began teaching students with LD and ADD, it seemed that a large number of my students fit the LD/ADHD profile, at least to a degree, even when they were not diagnosed with any learning issues. I began to wonder if, because I had a hammer, everything was starting to look like a nail.
About Visual-Spatial Skills
It turns out that there were actually a lot of nails. Ellen Winner (1996) states that visual-spatial skills are linked to giftedness in music, art, and math. She notes that gifted musicians excel “… in visual-spatial skills, much like children gifted in drawing. Musicians (as well as painters) have been noted to have prodigious visual and aural memories” (Gifted Children 110-111).
Visual-spatial skills are also linked to learning disabilities. Spatial reasoning is the ability to manipulate objects in three dimensions in the mind. Ellen Winner (1996), Thomas G. West (1997), T.R. Miles (2001), Ronald Davis (2003), and Linda K. Silverman (2006) have all stated that high spatial reasoning can result in LD, giftedness, or both.
When students are both gifted and LD, they are called twice exceptional. According to Kimberly McCord (2017), twice exceptional music students are fairly common across all age groups.
Many music students have strengths in spatial reasoning. In fact, if you have musical talent, it is probable that you do too. However, not all students with high spatial reasoning will have ADHD or LD.
On the other hand, a student with strengths in spatial reasoning but no overt learning struggles will still benefit from a qualitatively different teaching approach.
About the Blog: The Successful Music Student
What are your goals? Do you want to be able to read music or sight sing better? Frustrated that you have problems singing in tune? Want help tuning you guitar or synth so they sound better? Want to write great songs? Look no further.
Over the years, I have perfected my “hammer” into a precision tool. For this reason, many of the Successful Music Student posts will focus on color coding to help students to learn to read music. This is not all I do for multisensory teaching strategies. However, it is a large part of my teaching approach, and I am giving it to you in the Successful Music Student blog.
Regardless of whether students exhibit LD tendencies or not, multisensory teaching techniques are also beneficial for both typical learners and special needs students. These students are covered in the color coding blog topic as well.
Similar in many ways to color coding, shape notes help singers sight sing better. This gets covered in the Shape Notes and Solfege blog category.
Also, The Craft of Songwriting post category gives you tips for creating stronger songs.
That is not all! The blog features an online ear training tutor. The Singing in Tune posts have sing-along song tracks that will help you learn how to sing in tune. They work like the singing equivalent of a flight simulator, distilling the essential elements you need to work on to improve. (Click here for the Intonation Flight Simulator posts.)
Finally, musical terms are linked to definition pages, making the blog accessible to non-musicians. However, even college music professors will find plenty of depth in the information provided. All of the topics are about learning music, just different aspects of the learning process.
A new Successful Music Student blog article will be posted at least once a week (on Saturdays).
– Geoffrey Keith
Mission Statement
Success is what I want every one of my students to experience in lessons. This is the goal I strive for. I will put all of my energy into discovering my student’s learning style, applying or creating appropriate teaching methods to address my student’s needs.
Vision
To teach all types of students through lessons and blogs, helping them to reach their peak potential as musicians.
Values
- That quality instruction is essential
- That fun enhances the learning experience
- That mistakes are not to be feared, but rather are a necessary part of the learning process as students works through them
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