No. You don’t need to read music to take lessons with me, and I won’t make you learn. I teach chord charts and ear, not sight-reading. Lessons are in your home in the Denver metro or online. Adult lessons are $90 in-home or $75 on Zoom, with a founding rate of $75 and $60 for my first 10 new students through December 31, 2026, and the full grid is on the rates page.
What you need in your living room, or at a jam, is to be able to hear a song, know where it’s going, and play along with it, and that’s the thing we build.
What a chord chart is #
Standard notation writes down every note you play and how long each one lasts. A chord chart writes down the chords and how the song is put together. Four bars of G, two of C, two of D, back to the top, and the chorus goes here. It fits on one page, and it’s letters and a count, so there’s nothing to decode before you can use it.
What it leaves out is the part you already have. You know the melody of the song you picked. You know where the drums drop out and where the big chord hits. Once you can hear the chord change coming and you know the shapes, the chart is a reminder, and eventually you stop looking at it.
What we do instead #
We start with songs you actually want to play, on the instrument you want to play them on. We listen to the song together and work out what key it’s in and where the chords change, and I show you the shapes on the neck or the keys, and you learn to read the chart for it. If a song needs a technique you don’t have yet, we build an exercise for it, but only as far as it serves the song.
This is close to how I learned most of what I play. My own training is jazz band in high school and college, private lessons on the guitar, self-taught on bass and drums, and piano lessons as a small child that I don’t remember. Most of my actual skill comes from how I’ve developed my ability to listen and implement what I hear. When I picked the bass back up, I sat in front of YouTube and played jazz exercises, two-five-ones, for hours a day. On piano I picked “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan to learn first, because I like to pick hard songs and learn them first so that everything else seems easy, and I used it to learn all of those chords and how they worked and interacted. I’m a little rusty on the piano today, and I can read down a chord chart in a pop, rock, or sometimes simpler slower jazz situation.
There's music theory under everything, and jazz has a particular set of colors, and so does flamenco, and so does pop, and rock, and R&B.
Doesn't skipping notation mean skipping theory? #
Notation is a way of writing music down. Theory is why the chords go where they go, and you can learn a great deal of it from a chart and your ears. When we work through a song, you’ll find out why the chorus lifts and why one particular chord sounds like it’s pulling you home. That’s theory. It sits under every kind of music, and each kind of music gets painted with it in a slightly different way; jazz uses one set of colors and pop and rock use another.
What you'll play from #
On drums there’s no chart to read at all. We work inside music you love, by ear, and reading drum notation isn’t part of what I teach on any instrument.
For playing songs you love, at home or with friends or at a jam, a chord chart and a decent set of ears are what I teach with.