Sounds & Friends Piano Studio

I decided to make a grand finale practice chart for the end of our first unit. Look how much the students can do after just 7 classes!

JANUARY CELEBRATIONS!

After just 4 classes in 2026, there’s already so much to celebrate!🎉

🎹 Real-life music skills: Every student is playing together in duets—with each other, not just with me.

🥁Rhythm wins: Two students combined their pieces into one performance. One even transformed her piece from a march-style feel into a waltz so they worked better together.

✨Creative bonuses: Students are improvising by
- making medleys (stringing songs together into something new)

- adding extra notes so a one-hand song becomes a two-hand song

- experimenting with faster or slower speeds

🤯 Next-level coordination: One student played TWO different pieces at the same time—one in each hand!

❄️Snowstorm win: Thanks to easy rescheduling, everyone stayed safe and still got piano class.

💖Special teacher moment: I finally met a student in person who’s been taking lessons online for 5 years. It was so wonderful to see her—and now that we’re in person, her practice motivation has taken off!

I’m really enjoying these students and I’m so excited to see where they go!

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I just restarted the studio this month after moving from Arizona to Virginia last summer. I'm now teaching out of my home and have gotten to indulge...in capybara decor. 😂

I have 3 (stuffed) capybaras of various sizes in my studio as well as a capybara wall calendar (a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law!). So, my students know I love capybaras!

I've designated one of the stuffed capybaras as "the Resting Tone Capybara (who thinks he's an owl)." Students learn to musically orient themselves by helping the Resting Tone Capybara sing the resting tone or "home note" of different songs.

(This is similar to learning a new city by navigating to each new place from your home. You could just drive from the grocery store to the post office to the gas station, but it's not going to do you much good until you know how to reliably get to at least one of those places from your house!)

The Resting Tone Capybara has been a huge hit. Yesterday one of my students gave me this fantastic drawing - and I LOVE IT!

For incoming ASU vocal majors!

Submit the interest form here: https://forms.gle/xQuQcpyCDj6aQX6K6

We had our first Sounds & Friends Studio Showcase on May 18!

This was NOT a traditional piano recital.

Students not only played solos, but also…
- Improvised on the spot (according to audience requests)
- Created variations on existing pieces
- Combined songs to fit a story they created
- Taught audience members
- Composed parts to play alongside audience members
- etc.

It was so much fun! The students not only played well, but courageously interacted with many different audience members (there were shy 7 year old students guiding adult audience members on what to play)!

Sometimes trying to relate to students goes way off...

*with 6 year-olds in the midst of making a musical, virtual holiday/birthday/gift card*

Me: I remember when I was your age that sometimes it was hard to give people presents because I didn't have money.

Student: What?! They didn't have money in the 80s?!

.......

Lessons started August 1!

So far in the first week and a half of lessons...

- 2 siblings wanted to take the grand piano home with them.

- The same pair have played 2 duets successfully and learned 4 songs.

- 1 student created his own ABA-form song that combined a snippet of Beethoven's 5th with the first piece in his book.

- An adult student went home and taught her husband to play the new song she learned so they could play together.

- A preschooler successfully identified the groups of 3 black keys and 2 black keys he'd had a hard time with before

- A returning student forgot next to nothing over the summer break and we picked up right where we left off!

Piano lessons with space for growth and curiosity...giving kids a break from a results-oriented world.

I'm Arielle Sukhram-Ziemer, pianist and piano teacher. In my almost-decade of teaching, I've seen two main issues in students' lives.

1. They have no time/mental space/energy to practice. So many families today are running around all over the place, trying to fit everything in - trying to give their kids all the opportunities to set them up for success. So kids get a lot of experiences, but not necessarily not a lot of time at home to process them.

2. They don't get a lot of chances to be creative. At school, there are tests and projects - lots of intake and answering questions, but not much creative output. At the same time, fewer parents have musical experience - so they can't really tell whether their kids are learning or not except by how many songs they're passing...so even though kids are signed up for "music" which is a form of "art" which should be "creative"...they're still ONLY learning what other people have created.

The combination of these two things becomes disastrous for kids' progress. If there's no time to practice and the only measurement for learning that parents have is something that kids have to practice...well...why bother?

At Sounds & Friends, I want something different for my students. I want them to experience music creatively - and still learn the great music that's already out there. I want them to be able to play the piano for fun at home - not out of guilt. And I want parents to be able to relax and appreciate their kids' creativity as it develops.

So at Sounds & Friends...
- Students learn together - because creativity thrives on inspiration.

- Students engage in singing, movement, and drawing so that learning sticks - even if they can't get to the piano 'til the next lesson.

- The core curriculum songs are extremely simple and easy to learn - on average, students can master a new song in about 10 minutes.

- Students immediately use their core songs to create their own changes, mashups, medleys, intros and outros, etc. They stay engaged and solidify their learning through creativity. (And because they're with other students - they get to witness a huge amount of ideas!)

- Students learn great music - broken up into a thorough, step-by-step learning process that includes listening, moving, identifying different parts of the song, improvising with the different parts - so that once they learn it, they truly KNOW it inside and out.

- "Practicing" is easy. Students start off just by listening at home - while they're in the car, brushing their teeth, or waiting for dinner. You don't have to make a 30-minutes-a-day-or-you'll-never-progress practice commitment. Just start incorporating small amounts of music into everyday life.

- As they progress, they'll have creative projects that they'll enjoy working on at home - to share with their friends at class!

If you want a non-stressful, thorough learning experience, message me below! I look forward to talking with you.