Welcome to the Carter Piano Studio. I teach piano to beginning, intermediate and early-advanced students, ages five and up, in the studio at my home on Maple Avenue. I have taught piano for eighteen years, and I believe that just about anyone who is willing to practice can learn to play, and to play well enough to give real pleasure to themselves and the people around them. That is the goal of this studio: not prodigies, but people who will still be playing the piano when they are seventy.

Two openings are available on Wednesday afternoons for the fall term. See below.

Missed lessons. Your lesson time is reserved for you, and I am here for it whether you come or not, so missed lessons are not refunded or deducted. If you let me know at least 24 hours ahead, I will do my best to offer a make-up time during the same month, but I cannot promise one; my schedule is full. Lessons missed because of illness on the day are simply lost, I'm afraid, though if I have a cancellation that week I will call you. If I must cancel, I will always make it up or credit the next month. Lessons that fall on major holidays are skipped and not charged. There are no lessons the week of Christmas or the week of the Fourth of July.

Practice. Piano is learned at home between lessons, not at the lesson. I ask for practice six days a week, and I keep a practice sheet in each student's notebook that a parent initials. Here is what I expect, by level:

• Beginners (first year): 15 to 20 minutes a day. Short and daily beats long and occasional. For a five- or six-year-old, two ten-minute sessions are better than one.
• Elementary (years two to three): 30 minutes a day.
• Intermediate: 45 minutes a day, and a plan: scales and technique first, then the assigned pieces, then something fun.
• Adults: whatever you can honestly manage, as long as it is most days. Twenty minutes every day will get you further than an hour on Sunday.

Parents. Parents of young children are welcome to sit in on lessons, and I encourage it for the first year, because you will be the one supervising practice. Please bring the notebook and the books to every lesson. Please arrive on time and pick up on time; the next student is waiting. And please do not tell your child that you were never any good at music. They believe you.

Recitals are not required, but they are strongly encouraged, and nearly everyone plays. See below.

Withdrawing. A month's notice, please, so I can offer the time to a student on the waiting list. I understand that children's interests change; I only ask that a student finish the month.

Beginners start in one of the standard method series, the kind that come as a set of thin books per level: a lesson book, a theory book, a technique book and a book of extra pieces. Which series I use depends on the age of the student; the ones written for young children have larger print and move more slowly, and the ones for adults and older beginners assume you can read a paragraph and want to play a real piece by the second month. All of them teach reading music from the very first lesson. I do not teach by ear or by numbers; I want my students to be able to open any book and play what is on the page.

After the method books, usually around the third or fourth year, we move into collections of real repertoire: the easy pieces of Bach, Clementi sonatinas, Burgmüller studies, Schumann's Album for the Young, and on from there, plus a scale and arpeggio book that stays with you forever. Popular music, hymns, movie tunes and Christmas carols are welcome as extras once the assigned work is done, and I keep a shelf of them.

You need a piano at home. Not for the first lesson, but soon. Here is my advice, given about fifty times a year.

1. A used upright is fine. A good used vertical piano from a reputable dealer, or from a private seller with a technician's inspection, is the right instrument for nearly every beginner and most intermediates. You do not need a grand. You do not need a new one. What you need is a piano whose keys all work, whose action is even, and that will hold a tuning.
2. Have it looked at before you buy. For a private sale, pay a piano technician to inspect it (see the tuner below; a small fee, well worth it). A piano can look beautiful and have a cracked soundboard or a pinblock that will not hold tune. Both are expensive or impossible to fix.
3. Free pianos are rarely free. The one from your aunt's basement that has not been tuned since 1974 will cost $150 to move and may not be tunable. Ask the technician first.
4. Keep it away from the radiator, and away from heating vents, fireplaces, drafty windows and outside walls if you can. Heat and dry air are what put pianos out of tune and crack their soundboards. An inside wall in a room with steady temperature is ideal.
5. Tune it twice a year, usually spring and fall when the heat goes off and on. Every piano goes out of tune, and a piano that is out of tune teaches a child the wrong pitches and makes practice unpleasant. This is not optional.
6. About electronic keyboards. A full-size digital piano with 88 weighted keys will do for the first year or two if space or money makes an acoustic piano impossible. A small unweighted keyboard will not; the touch is nothing like a piano, and a child who learns on one has to start over on the real thing. If you go digital, buy the stand and the bench and set it up at the right height, permanently, not on the kitchen table.
7. A bench, not a chair, adjusted so the forearms are level with the keys. For small children this also means a footstool. Feet that dangle make for a tense back.

I recommend Walt, who has tuned my studio piano and my own piano at home for fifteen years and who does the piano at the church before every recital. He is a registered technician, he is honest about what a piano needs and what it doesn't, and he will inspect a piano you are thinking of buying for a modest fee. He is often booked a couple of weeks out in the fall. Ask me for his number at your lesson, or send me an e-mail.

I am Diane C. I began piano at age six, with a teacher in her front room who rapped my knuckles with a pencil, which is why I do not. I earned a Bachelor of Music degree in piano performance and pedagogy from the state university, taught music in the public schools for four years, and opened this studio in 1981 when my own children were small. I have taught continuously since then: roughly 35 students a week, several hundred over the years, a few of whom went on to study music in college and most of whom went on to something else and still, they tell me, play. I am a member of our state music teachers' association, and my students may participate each spring in its festival and theory examinations.

I still take lessons myself, once a month, from a teacher in the city, because I think a teacher who has stopped being a student has stopped understanding what she is asking of hers. I play for the church on alternate Sundays and accompany the high school choir when they will have me.