Music Coach Spotlight on Piano Coach & Teacher Merrilee Webb

Written By Christopher Russell
Interview Conducted By Derek Berg (Music Coach Magazine Founder)

There’s more than one way to learn the piano. The traditional method doesn’t work for everyone, and in fact a dismaying number of people give up altogether before they’ve even begun to enjoy it. Music coach Merrilee Webb wanted to do something about this. Having learned to play piano under an innovative system originally pioneered by C. W. Reid in the 1930s, she decided more people needed to be let in on his simple – but revolutionary – way of thinking.

We’ve collected some of Merrilee’s thoughts together and formulated five powerful strategies focused in showing you how you might go about creating your own unique music coaching system.

1. Learn from other music coaches and teachers

Merrilee began learning the piano at the age of five under the tutelage of a teacher she describes as ‘awesome’, and who taught her students using C. W. Reid’s alternative piano method. Reid himself learned traditionally, but here’s the thing – he very nearly gave up, because he had such a tough time memorizing the notes. He couldn’t make the connection between how the notes on the piano keyboard related to the notes on the page, and began to wonder why we assign random letter names to the keys and, in doing so, massively complicate the entire process.

He began to see patterns on the printed page that directly coincided with patterns on the keyboard. He took away teaching letter names at the outset, and instead just called each note what it actually was – ‘it sits on the bottom line, so we call it bottom line’, and so on. The name of the note and the position of the note match, which means you can teach someone to read music in, quite literally, minutes. Even more importantly, they will retain what they know. Clever, huh?

Merrilee says: ‘When I’m reading music, I’m not looking at the notes on the page as A, B and C. I’m thinking of the notes in terms of lines and spaces and how they relate to logical patterns on the keyboard. If your sight reading strategy is focused on memorizing note names, you’re ultimately slowing yourself down immensely’.

Merrilee’s very open about the fact that she didn’t invent the system – she just re-purposed it and brought it to the world. She started by gleaning what she needed from Reid and then found a way to apply what she’d learned to the 21st century. Filming a series of group learning sessions with a selection of her students  (she calls them ‘reality TV piano lessons’!), she put together an educational DVD series and in doing so made Reid’s system available to music students all across the planet.

 2. Don’t just assume the traditional way is the only way

Merrilee is very creative in her approach to teaching the piano. One of the key elements of her trademark RKM (‘Reading Keyboard Music’) method is that it doesn’t make the assumption that the traditional way is the only way. She found something that was faster, more efficient and less intimidating to learners, and wasn’t afraid to stick her neck out and make a case for a different kind of system.

‘It’s not that the traditional method doesn’t work,’ she explains, ‘but that it takes too much time and you have to memorize a random assignment to a note’. With RKM, she continues, ‘people can begin reading music immediately’.

Merrilee bought the rights to Reid’s method in 2005, and hasn’t looked back since. Determined not to be restrained by the traditional learning process, she found a way to make the method available to anyone, anywhere in the world, through a DVD that featured real live people learning in a live group environment. And the rest, as they say, is history.

These days she’s looking into live streaming as a teaching method, which would make it possible for students to interact with each other while learning, regardless of where they live. She’s keen to be right on the cutting edge of music coaching, not just for the sake of it but because she can reach more people that way.

‘That’s what technology is for me. It’s just a vehicle, a way to get to more people’.

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In the fist issue we will be featuring music coaches from all topic areas…from piano coaches to music business coaches. Read what Scott Houston, Bob Baker, John Tuggle, John Oszajca, and Mike Michalkow are doing to change the way we share our musical knowledge and message.