1st lesson free
Fiona
- Rate $77
- Response 1h
$77/hr
Contact
1st lesson free
- Piano
- Musical keyboard
- Synthesizer
- Jazz Piano
- Harpsichord
Mindful Piano Tutor 7 Years Experience 275+ Students Taught Mindfulness Practice Techniques Mental Performance Skills Anxiety Reduction All Ages Levels
- Piano
- Musical keyboard
- Synthesizer
- Jazz Piano
- Harpsichord
Lesson location
About Fiona
I am a piano tutor with 7 years of teaching experience and a Bachelor of Music in Piano alongside a Certificate in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction from a university medical school programme. I have taught over 275 students and I have a professional background in sport psychology consultation alongside music teaching, which is an unusual combination that has profoundly shaped how I think about performance preparation and mental skill development. I have written a short guide on mindful practice for pianists that has been downloaded several thousand times, and I occasionally deliver workshops on performance psychology for music schools and conservatoires. I continue to perform publicly on piano in order to maintain direct experience of the performance challenges I teach students to manage.
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About the lesson
- All Levels
- English
All languages in which the lesson is available :
English
My piano teaching has been significantly shaped by my parallel training in mindfulness and performance psychology, and I integrate these disciplines into every lesson rather than treating them as supplements to technical instruction. I open every lesson with a two-minute mindful arrival practice — simply sitting at the piano, placing the hands on the keys without playing, and attending to the physical sensations of the moment — because this transition from daily life to musical practice is almost never taught explicitly despite being crucial to the quality of what follows. My approach to practice methodology is research-based: I teach distributed practice over massed practice, interleaving over blocked repetition, and contextual interference over pure isolation, and I explain the research behind each recommendation so students practise intelligently by design rather than habit. The internal dialogue of a pianist at the instrument — the self-talk, the evaluations, the comparisons — is discussed directly in my teaching because it has a profound effect on learning speed and performance quality that standard technical instruction completely ignores. Failure during practice is reframed in my studio as information rather than inadequacy — students learn to treat an error as a data point about what needs more specific attention rather than as evidence of unsuitability. My approach to difficult passages involves a structured diagnosis protocol: we identify whether a difficulty is rhythmic, technical, harmonic, or memory-based, because each type of difficulty requires a different type of practice to resolve. Performance preparation in my studio extends from the technical and musical into the physiological — students learn specific physical routines for managing adrenaline, slowing breathing, and grounding attention before walking onto a stage. I teach students to take breaks during home practice based on evidence about cognitive fatigue rather than arbitrary time intervals, because tired practice embeds errors rather than correcting them. Goal-setting in my studio is collaborative and specific — we set process goals alongside outcome goals so students have clear daily targets regardless of how far away the outcome goal feels. My teaching aim is a pianist who can perform their best under the highest pressure they will realistically face.
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Rates
Rate
- $77
Pack prices
- 5h: $385
- 10h: $770
online
- $77/h
free lessons
The first lesson with Fiona will allow you to get to know each other and discuss your needs for future lessons.
- 1hr
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