Collins Tifang

I'm a self-taught piano teacher and everything I do is built around playing by ear. Learning complex chord changes, syncopation, improvisation, and all my favorite songs entirely by ear is what has been driving me from the very beginning and is still what gets me excited today. I don't have any formal training, just a deep curiosity and the discipline to stay with it until things clicked. Spending over eight years without a musical instrument yet finding ways to get better and grow is what molded me into the teacher I am today. Outside of the piano I also explore music production, orchestration, mixing and mastering, and I play bass and drums, all self-taught.

Over 16 years I have worked with 50+ students, kids and adults, mostly within the church context in Cameroon, where I developed my grounding in gospel, worship, R&B, hip-hop, soul, and jazz. In 2025 I served as Musical Director for an artist at the Worship Exodus concert in Buea, one of the region's prominent worship events. Later that same year I also served as Musical Director at the Kerygma Gospel concert in Bafoussam.

My teaching roots go back to 2010 at Full Gospel Mission Cameroon in Bafoussam, where barely three years into music I started organizing free summer music lessons for kids and adults, teaching piano and drums to kids from my church and others around. From 2020 to 2023 I served as Music Director and tutor at Full Gospel Mission SOCADA, overseeing the musical development of the choir, and during those three years I also trained kids and adult members interested in learning drums, piano, and bass guitar. In 2022 I volunteered as a tutor with the Rock to the Future online program, teaching kids music production.

Since 2022 I have been teaching piano online via Skype and Google Meet to students across Cameroon, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I currently work with around six long-term students, most of whom I have been with for over a year. My youngest student, a 5-year-old, played her first song, Mary Had a Little Lamb, all by ear after just two lessons. One of my teenage students went on to play at her church in Canada for the first time following our lessons together. I also worked with an already-playing gospel pianist in Douala, helping him develop richer, more complex chords and voicings to elevate his playing.

I believe every student has their own unique fingerprint. Music theory is just a tool — a set of letters in an alphabet — and learning those letters is only the beginning. What I actually care about is helping you articulate your own musical thoughts. So we don't spend a lot of time on theory upfront. We get our hands dirty and start playing as soon as possible.

Being self-taught for over a decade meant I learned a lot of things the hard way, and that pushed me to develop simpler, more direct methods to get students to their specific goals without drowning in unnecessary theory. Here is some of what we can work on together:

• Performing your favorite songs on the go
• Playing more expressively and freely
• Learning worship piano for your church
• Learning those interesting R&B and worship chords you keep hearing
• Making your rhythm more interesting and your chords sound fuller
• Developing a more melodic approach to playing like those gospel and R&B heads you look up to
• Understanding and personalizing your own sound

My lessons come with structured practice routines and exercises. Live lessons include chord charts and an overhead view of the piano so you can see exactly what I'm playing in real time — especially useful if you just want to learn a song or a few chords quickly. And the part I'm most proud of — I share ear training exercises I developed over the years, the same ones that molded me into the musician and teacher I am today. For the kids, I bring fun and engaging melodies, exercises, and mnemonics to keep them glued to the screen and actually enjoying the process.