What I Teach
From advanced drumset technique to the neuroscience of musicianship, physical wellness, and transformational coaching for musicians or educators on any instrument — every topic draws on 30+ years of experience, research-backed methodology, and a holistic understanding of what it means to be a musician.
What I Teach
From advanced drumset technique to the neuroscience of musicianship, physical wellness, and transformational coaching for musicians or educators on any instrument — every topic draws on 25+ years of experience, research-backed methodology, and a holistic understanding of what it means to be a musician.
Tier 1: Instrument Mastery
$150/30 min | $250/60 min
These sessions blend my flipped classroom methodology with research-backed foundational learning theories for maximum efficiency. Between lessons, you’ll work with carefully assigned video content so you practice with a clear model of correct technique. Our time together is 100% personalized feedback and coaching.
I teach drumset privately. For all other instruments — including flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, cello, and more — Practicing Musician offers free Fundamentals of Music Mastery courses for 15 instruments and affordable private lessons with expert teachers trained in my methodology.
Drumset — Advanced Technique
My primary instrument for 20+ years. Whether you’re working on independence, interdependence, groove, odd time signatures, polyrhythms, brush technique, rudimental application, or preparing for auditions, I bring both deep performance experience and a research-based teaching methodology that accelerates your progress. Suitable for absolute beginners through advanced players.
Tier 2: Musicianship & Wellness
$400/30 min | $650/60 min
These sessions go beyond any single instrument. They address the neuroscience and first principles underlying all musicianship, the science of how musicians learn and perform, and the physical and mental wellness practices that sustain a lifetime of playing. Open to musicians of all instruments and levels.
Several Tier 2 and Tier 3 topics serve non-musicians as well. Performance Anxiety & Mental Game, Mindfulness Through Music, Health & Strength Training, Flexibility Training, Music and Recovery, and Music and Spiritual Formation address dimensions of human performance and transformation that extend far beyond musical skill. You do not need to play an instrument to benefit. Read If It Works in Music, It Works Everywhere.
Musical First Principles & Applied Neuroscience
This isn't a standard music theory class. Musical first principles are the foundational cognitive and physical processes that underlie all musicianship — and they're rooted in neuroscience. We go deep: how music facilitates neural connections across brain regions, exercises designed to strengthen the corpus callosum, developing Broca's and Wernicke's areas for deeper musical language processing, and understanding how rhythm, pitch, dynamics, and phrasing emerge from neurological architecture. Most musicians learn these principles implicitly and incompletely, if at all. When you understand them explicitly, you can learn any instrument faster, overcome plateaus that have nothing to do with practice time, and teach others more effectively.
Performance Anxiety & Mental Game Mastery
Stage fright isn’t a character flaw — it’s a neurological response, and it can be managed with the right understanding and tools. Drawing from my psychology degree and years of performance experience, these sessions address the cognitive, physiological, and behavioral dimensions of performance anxiety. We work on pre-performance routines, reframing techniques, breathing protocols, visualization, and the deeper mindset shifts that allow you to perform at your best when the stakes are highest. The neuroscience behind this applies far beyond the stage. Read more.
Health for Musicians
Musicians face unique occupational health challenges rarely addressed in traditional lessons: repetitive strain injuries, postural imbalances, hearing protection, and the cumulative physical toll of practice and performance. But the deeper issue is what happens outside the practice room. Sleep directly affects motor memory consolidation. Nutrition affects cognitive function and inflammatory response in overworked joints. Exercise habits either support your playing or quietly work against it. Your body is your instrument's instrument. I rebuilt mine from the ground up after fourteen years of severe addiction — reversing nearly all the damage through deliberate work on sleep, nutrition, movement, and recovery. This isn't generic wellness advice. It's targeted guidance from someone who learned the hard way that the condition of the vessel matters as much as what you put into it.
The Neuroscience of Musical Practice
How does the brain actually learn music? What does the research say about practice strategies, memory consolidation, and motor skill acquisition in the role of musical development? In these sessions, I translate the same body of scientific research that I compiled to design the Practicing Musician’s curriculum — including cognitive load theory, spaced practice, retrieval practice, interleaving, and dual coding — into easy-to-understand practical strategies for your own practice. You’ll understand not just what to practice, but how and why. These learning principles aren’t music-specific. Read why they apply to any discipline.
Mindfulness Through Music
Music is one of the most accessible doorways into a state of flow — that condition of total absorption where time disappears and your best work emerges naturally. These sessions teach you how to cultivate that state intentionally, using your instrument as a tool for present-moment awareness. We explore slow practice as meditation, listening as a contemplative discipline, and the relationship between focused attention and musical expression. Integrating principles from my yoga training and psychology background with practical musical application. No instrument experience required. Learn why music provides one of the most neurologically rich pathways into focused attention.
Why Music Is the Highest Liberal Art
The ancient quadrivium organized mathematical knowledge into four disciplines: arithmetic (pure number), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time). Astronomy encompasses both dimensions but can only be observed intellectually. Performed music is different — your body moves through physical space, producing mathematically structured sound that unfolds in time. It is number in space and time experienced from the inside. For the intellectually curious, musician or not. No instrument required. Learn more about why the ancients were right.
Music as Yoga
The word “yoga” means union — the integration of body, breath, and mind. Music is one of the most powerful forms of this integration available to human beings. In these sessions, we explore how musical practice can become a meditative discipline: coordinating breath with phrasing, cultivating awareness of tension and release in the body, developing the focused presence that transforms mechanical playing into something alive. Drawing from my 200-hour yoga teaching certification and decades of musical practice, I help you experience music not just as a skill to develop but as a practice that develops you.
Targeted Flexibility Training for Musicians
Flexibility isn’t about being able to touch your toes — it’s about having the range of motion your instrument demands, in the specific joints and muscle groups that matter. Tight hip flexors affect a drummer’s pedal technique. Restricted shoulder mobility limits a flutist’s embouchure stability. Wrist inflexibility creates tension that ripples through a pianist’s entire technique. These sessions identify your specific flexibility limitations and address them systematically, drawing from my yoga training and instrument-specific knowledge.
Targeted Strength Training for Musicians
The physical demands of musicianship are instrument-specific, and generic strength training can actually work against you. A drummer needs different conditioning than a flutist. A pianist’s forearm and hand strength requirements differ from a guitarist’s. In these sessions, I design strength protocols targeted to your instrument, your body, and your playing goals — building the specific muscular endurance, stability, and power that translate directly to better performance and injury prevention.
Theory of Relativity in Music
Everything in music is relative. A note has no inherent meaning until it's placed in relation to other notes. Rhythm exists only in relation to a pulse. Dynamics are perceived relative to what came before and what comes after. Consonance and dissonance, tension and resolution, even tempo — all relational. But relativity doesn't stop at the music stand. At NAMM 2020, surrounded by 120,000 musicians, I played near my best — until I didn’t. When my playing got measurably worse, I looked around to see what happened. I noticed some of the most famous and accomplished drummers had started to observe my playing. That's not a confidence problem. That's your anterior cingulate cortex detecting a higher-competence observer, spiking cortisol, and pulling your prefrontal cortex into a fight with the automated motor patterns your basal ganglia have spent decades refining. Relativity governs what you hear and what you can do. This topic explores both dimensions — and how understanding them transforms the way you listen, practice, and perform.
Tier 3: Transformation & Program Design
$600/30 min | $900/60 min
These sessions draw on my full range of experience — as a founder, educator, curriculum designer, board member, recovery advocate, and servant leader. They’re for people who want music to be a catalyst for something larger, and for educators and parents seeking expert guidance on building effective programs.
Music was central to my own recovery from 14 years of severe addiction. The neuroscience is clear: music activates reward pathways, regulates emotion, builds new neural connections, and provides a disciplined practice that supports sustained sobriety. In these sessions, I share both the research and the personal experience — offering practical strategies for using music as a tool for healing, self-regulation, and the daily work of building a new life. For anyone in recovery, or anyone who loves someone in recovery and wants to understand how music can help.
Music and Recovery
Music and Spiritual Formation
Music has been a vehicle for spiritual experience across every culture and every age of human history. These sessions explore the intersection of musical practice and spiritual growth — how focused attention through music becomes a form of stewardship, how ensemble playing teaches us about community and interdependence, and how the discipline of mastering an instrument mirrors the discipline of shaping a life of purpose. Grounded in my own faith journey and applicable across traditions.
I designed comprehensive curricula for 20 instruments, beta-tested them personally in five schools, and watched them scale to adoption across 831 school districts in 90+ countries. I’ve conducted in-services for major districts including San Diego City Unified, San Bernardino City Unified, and Miami-Dade County Public Schools. In these sessions, I bring that curriculum design expertise directly to you — helping you build, refine, or reimagine your program’s instructional framework. Whether you’re starting from scratch or restructuring an existing program, I can help you create a curriculum that’s research-based, sequentially sound, and practically effective.
Curriculum Design for Music Educators
As a former homeschool co-op band director and the founder of a platform that serves homeschool families globally, I understand the unique challenges and extraordinary opportunities of music education outside traditional school settings. These sessions help homeschooling parents design structured, progressive music programs for their children — including instrument selection, curriculum sequencing, practice frameworks, performance opportunities, and leveraging technology and community resources.
Homeschool Music Program Design
Entrepreneurship for Musicians
I bootstrapped a music education company from a one-person operation to a platform active in 90+ countries with 2,821 educator users, with 25 team members and 150+ volunteer contributors — without venture capital or a traditional path. I’ve since completed the Executive Development Program at the University of Washington Foster School of Business and earned a Financial Accounting Certificate from Harvard Business School Online. In these sessions, I help musicians and music educators think strategically about building sustainable careers and businesses around their skills, whether that means launching a teaching studio, creating digital products, or scaling a music-related venture.
Whether you’re a school administrator launching a new music program, a church starting a worship music ministry, or a community organization bringing music to an underserved population, these sessions provide a comprehensive roadmap. From budgeting and instrument acquisition to curriculum selection, teacher hiring, and program evaluation — I’ve done all of it, across public schools, private schools, homeschool co-ops, churches, and organizations. I help you avoid the expensive mistakes and build something sustainable from day one.
Building a Music Program from Scratch
Most musicians plateau on their primary instrument partly because they’ve never explored the transferable principles that connect all instruments. Learning a second or third instrument — even at a basic level — deepens your understanding of music itself and often breaks through plateaus on your primary instrument. Drawing from my experience across drumset, flute, piano, and percussion (and from designing curriculum for 20 instruments), I help you develop a strategic multi-instrumental practice that strengthens your overall musicianship.