Getting Started

My name is Brian Callahan and I own Callahan’s School of Music In Reno Nevada.

I had always wanted to play the piano for as long as I can remember. Around eight years old, I probably heard some rock ‘n’ roll and thought, “Hey, I wanna do that!” I asked my mom if I could take piano lessons and ended up with a concert/classical teacher. She was fantastic! I was not. But I couldn’t have cared less whether I was playing Beethoven or Lynyrd Skynyrd. I just wanted to play.

I even got kicked out of piano lessons once, in the seventh grade, for “wasting my mom’s money and wasting my teacher’s time.” After some tears and struggling, I went back to the same teacher and really put my nose to the grindstone. I made some real progress, but at the age of 16, I decided I was going to be a rock ‘n’ roll star. So I quit lessons on my own volition and played in rock bands, touring and playing locally. I got good at that!

But as I became a young adult, I knew I needed to find a career, and it was obvious that being a rock star wasn’t going to be it. I had already been in and out of college, but really buckled down around the age of 23. I got married at 24 and started teaching piano lessons at 25—and I loved it! But I wanted more than just being able to do “private lessons.” It was far too limiting.

I was taking piano lessons from a fantastic professor in college, and it was actually great that I was a little older because I had become more of an adult in terms of talking and interacting with my teacher and other adults. In a conversation with my professor, as I was ending my college career but still continuing to take private lessons for pedagogy, he asked me, “What is your end goal? What is your plan?”

I told him that I wanted to continue teaching, that I was really good with kids, but that I wanted to do classes. My professor looked me straight in the eye and said, “You can’t teach piano class.” He clarified, saying it had been tried before and it didn’t work.

I have been successfully teaching classes with kids of different ages and levels in the same groups, and they are making more progress than I have ever seen with just private lessons. This program is how it happens.

When parents call about ages, I typically tell them that they need to be five years old and in kindergarten. They need to be able to pay attention and use the bathroom on their own. If they’re over 13 to 14 years old, I usually have to put them in a higher/older group, but beginners are beginners! So it doesn’t really matter too much.

Grand staff and sight-reading fundamentals. Sometimes on a whiteboard or a big screen tv, or even over their shoulders. Everyone has to learn the keyboard, their finger numbers and note reading. I also throw in rhythm understanding, counting and technic.

We bounce around the room playing songs from Mary Had a Little Lamb to Für Elise.  It is crucial for younger/beginners to hear others playing what is coming up as well as for older/more advanced to recall and review what the newbies are doing.

That’s where the magic happens with this app.  Headphones on.  The tunes start out simple and gradually get harder and harder. Kids listen to the songs, play the notes, play along, and then “perform” each piece with background accompaniment ranging from orchestras to rock bands.

If their accuracy is high enough, they earn a certificate. And it’s amazing how hard kids will work for those certificates!  

The teacher can see and know which song any and every student is working on. They can go around the room and help each one individually. Mostly subtle things like curving fingers, listening to rhythm, practicing small parts slowly, moving the hand here or there, etc. Even when they’ve got a kid who needs some wiggle room, they can lower the speed needed to achieve the certificate.

Kids’ birthdays are entered when they are signed up, and the rule is that they can slow it down to 10 times their age: 5-year-olds at 50 BPM, 10-year-olds at 100 BPM. But at 11 and up, they must play at the original speed for each song.

A teacher can also add or remove a certificate from the record as they see fit. Sometimes a student is good enough, or even better than the program, but just has their rhythm off or something. Time to move on. Or, if a kid logs on under the wrong name and accidentally gets a certificate for someone else, just remove it.

Guaranteed that when a kid gets the certificate, they can play that song well! In my recitals, kids are fantastic! All of their songs are memorized, and they play them like they own them. They obviously don’t have to memorize the songs to get the certificate; however, they’re still playing them with a great deal of precision.

When the certificate fanfare pops up on the screen and the fireworks are going off, the kids’ faces light up, and they yell out, “I got my certificate!” The teacher can see the certificate on the administrative side of the app and, of course, print it.