Hunter Glenn

I quit piano lessons as a kid because I thought they were boring and I wasn't learning quickly. As much as I liked my teacher, she used standard teaching methods which were supposed to take years to get past the basics.

Years later, I dove into the depths of music theory and developed my own piano method. Even when I then took 4 months of classes with a world-class pianist, I found that the standard methods he used were just too slow and rigid. As much as I heard that music was about expressing myself, I didn't feel I was doing much of that by practicing other people's music over and over.

In 2021, I started teaching piano especially for people who thought it was too late or too long to learn. I developed a teaching method that's all about helping my students hear their own inner response to their playing and move to reflect that inner feeling: to actually express themselves, in other words. I teach improv piano online, and my students learn to improvise their own moving music within just the first few lessons.

I've been refining my teaching method since I began teaching 12 years ago. I studied piano under Steinway Artist Dr. Del Parkinson at Boise State University in 2010. Beyond that, the reviews of my students speak for themselves.

I teach my students to listen to their own experience and feelings as they play, and to change their playing to reflect their inner experience. After all, if the way you feel about your playing doesn't have any effect on what you do next, your feelings become irrelevant. Actually expressing yourself with music means noticing how your music moves you, and then moving your music back, creating a two-way dialogue between your conscious and subconscious. It is a self-revelatory process. That is why humans do music.

Establishing this connection puts real soul into your music. It can unlock your playing incredibly quickly.

One student said: “Hunter is excellent at what he does! His listening skills and tailored feedback were so potent that just after a single hour-long session, my playing had improved significantly. You’ll relish learning from such a wise, efficient, and joyful instructor.”

Another said: “I did a series of lessons with Hunter on learning improv piano. He was able to break down many concepts for me such that I was able to catalyze a huge amount of material about piano playing…I would easily recommend learning from him. I went from knowing very little about music to now being able to hear and deconstruct what songs I want to crib from are 'doing' structurally and so able to add to my musical vocabulary of techniques over time."

But my favorite by far is still:

"TL;DR

Hunter gave me music!

He is the best piano teacher I’ve ever had or even heard of!

If you are someone who has always wanted to play piano but the idea of taking anything like the classical piano lessons of your youth, complete with hours of boring scales and practice, sounds awful to you, definitely book some time with Hunter!

— Where I was coming into my first lesson—

1. Deep desire to “have music” but unwilling to spend years of study to get it

I was Hunter’s first piano student!

In the course of a lazy afternoon hangout he said, “I think everyone teaches piano wrong, can I try teaching you?”

Hunter could do amazing things on the piano…like mad-pianist-Beethoven in the movies things. I was *so jealous*!

I had always wanted to be able to just *play* music the way some people could. To just sit down and make something that sounded beautiful, or meaningful or maybe even pop cultural and familiar (but without having it dedicated to memory already). I had been around a handful of people who could do this and I wanted deeply to *have music*, like them. But I hated the idea of lessons…

2. Very basic experience, beginner at best

I had taken piano lessons as a kid, so I had some very basic music theory. I could find “c” on the keyboard and plunk out the first 30% of “The Entertainer” after about 5 trys but that was about it.

I had also tried to pick up other instruments but bounced off for the same reason I kept bouncing off piano; I found it fun to learn and to play basic songs sometimes, but spending hours memorizing large pieces, practicing scales, studying theory, and repeating the same drills over and over again was prohibitively boring, nearing on oppressive to me.

I hated it and even though I *really* wanted to “have music” like these other people I knew, I felt like getting there was some combination of beyond my grasp and far far beyond my willingness to invest the practice and study required to get there.

Cue Hunter asking to teach me…

— My first few lessons + results —

3. Making my own music and developing musicality

We didn’t start with scales or simple songs or anything like that. Hunter started with teaching me a few simple guidelines, rails maybe is a better term, to play inside of that made it so that most anything I played came across as musical and not grating, or dissonant. Then, he gave me some pointers and we started experimenting with the different elements of musicality. All of a sudden I was hitting keys in sequence and rhythm that sounded…good(?!?), pretty even! I was blown away…but I felt like it was too good to be true…

4. Beginner to “experienced-sounding” in 2 weeks!

Hunter encouraged me to explore and express and listen to what I was playing. I loved that I could make things sound pretty, and so fast, but I was convinced that it couldn’t be so easy… I wasn’t good… I couldn’t be, right? What I was playing was so simple. So basic and I felt *so awkward*.

It’s strange but I seemed to have no sense or ability to tell if what I was doing was embarrassingly simple or on it’s way to good. Hunter kept telling me that it was sounding great and he’d pull up famous pieces and show me how simple pieces were some of the most beloved but I wasn’t buying it. Of course he would say so, he was my friend and teacher. I wasn’t convinced. What finally convinced me?

Well, Hunter was very clever at figuring out how to get over this particular sticky spot for me and I’m so grateful he did. It cleared up my self-doubt and finally hooked me for life on the piano. He took a recording of me playing one day and sent it to an old friend of his who is a professional pianist and teacher. With the message “Trying to get a read on how long this person has been playing. What do you think?”

The reply came a few days later “Sounds like 2-3 years at least”. I was blown away! I went from beginner to *making music* in 2 sessions and ~6 hours of practice. Not boring practice. Joyful, playful, expressive, and deeply gratifying practice!!! *mind blown emoji*. I was hooked.

5. Building my skills!

It hasn’t been easy, exactly, but it has been incredibly engaging and rewarding. There were, and still are, times when I want to get to the next level and practicing is challenging psychologically and physically. You know, the kind of learning that exhausts you after about 10 min while you swear you can feel your brain painstakingly building new pathways where there were no roads before?

That kind. Some early examples of this was learning to play with my left hand *at all*, and then learning to play with both hands simultaneously, and then learning to play with my left *while simultaneously* musically attending to and improvising with my right...each was exhausting and had the flavor of a kind of learning where I really had to focus and stretch myself and work through the discomfort of being completely unable to make my body and mind do what I knew was possible.

But this kind of struggle felt good and worth it, to me. None of it felt pointless or aimless or mind-numbing like practicing instruments felt in the past. And it was *fast*! It didn’t take more than a few intentional practice sessions before these things, at a basic level at least, were something I could smoothly do.

I included this part because I don’t want to give the impression that it didn’t take work to build skill. It just didn’t take hours and hours and hours of mind numbing theory and practice before I could make music…THAT happened in the first two weeks.

— Where I am now —

6. I have music!!

I’ve been playing for 2 years now and I’m not sure I will ever capture how much it has enriched my life. Sometimes I describe it by saying that I feel as if there is a way that I will never feel alone again so long as I have a piano.

There are times when sitting and playing the piano is the only way I can express or release an emotion or hard to feel mood. I can tell jokes on the piano. I can experiment. I can jam with other musicians. I can swap keys seamlessly, make up songs and participate in the most delightful improvised duets!

I have a lot more to learn and I’m thrilled about that, too.

I love that anytime I’m in the mood for a challenge, I can dig into the next level of musicianship.

If you’re still with me, thanks for reading my review and, like I said in the TL;DR, if you’ve always wanted to play and improvise but hated the idea of classical piano lessons and practice to get there, I highly recommend Hunter as a piano teacher and a “finding-your-own-music coach”. There really is no one like him."