A few months ago, I was chatting with one of my kid’s friends after school. He takes lessons somewhere — not with us — and I asked him what he was working on.
“I’m learning Riptide,” he said.
Great song. So I asked him a follow-up: what is Riptide teaching you?
He blinked at me. He had no idea.
And here’s the thing — it’s possible his teacher had a specific skill in mind and just hadn’t told him. But it’s also possible the song was the lesson. That the point was learning Riptide, full stop. No skill underneath it. No reason it was chosen over a hundred other songs. Just: here’s the next thing, let’s play it.
Either way, the kid couldn’t tell me. And that’s most of what’s wrong with music education.
Not because Riptide is a bad choice — it’s a great choice. But because somewhere along the way, we stopped telling students why we were handing them the things we were handing them. We stopped giving them the vocabulary to understand their own progress. We turned music lessons into a series of song titles, instead of a relationship with skill, sound, and self.
I’ve been teaching for a long time. I built Music Junkie Studios because I wanted a place where lessons felt like the opposite of that — where students knew exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it, and what it would unlock. Where parents could see the path, not just trust the process. Where the student was the protagonist, and the teacher was the guide.
So I built a method. I call it ADVANCE.
This post is the first in a series unpacking it — one letter at a time, one post at a time, over the next couple of months. By the end, you’ll understand exactly how we teach, why we teach this way, and what makes a lesson at MJS different from a lesson almost anywhere else.
The difference between a curriculum and a methodology
Most music studios have a curriculum. Book one, then book two, then book three. The student moves through the material. The teacher checks the boxes. Eventually there’s a recital.
That’s not a methodology. That’s a conveyor belt.
A methodology is a way of thinking about teaching — one that adapts to the student in front of you, instead of forcing the student to adapt to the system. It’s the difference between a doctor who actually examines you and a doctor who hands every patient the same prescription.
We don’t believe in cranking out mini-mes. We don’t believe one path fits every student. And we definitely don’t believe the goal of music lessons is to get really good at performing for an audience.
ADVANCE is what I built instead.
ADVANCE is a cycle, not a ladder
This part matters. Most music education is structured like a ladder — beginner, intermediate, advanced, done. There’s a top, and then it ends.
ADVANCE is a cycle. Students move through all seven stages, then start again with the next goal. Each loop deepens their skill, their agency, and their relationship with music. There’s no “graduating.” There’s just becoming a more interesting musician than you were six months ago.
Here’s the cycle:
A — Assess. We start by getting to know you. Not just where your skills are, but what excites you, how you learn, how you want us to communicate, and any past music lesson wounds we need to be careful with. The student we’re teaching is a whole person, not a skill level.
D — Decide. We choose the next goal together. Early on, the teacher leads more of this — but the longer a student is with us, the more they drive their own decisions. By the end, we’re often just nodding at choices they’ve already made. That’s the point.
V — Validate. Before we do the work, we explain why this work matters. What skill this song is teaching. What this skill will unlock. What doors it opens. This is the step almost every studio skips, and it’s one of the most important things we do.
A — Acquire. This is where the new skill actually gets built. The reps, the challenge, the patience. But — and this is huge — we let what we learned in Assess shape how we teach here. We don’t deliver every lesson the same way. We can’t. Real one-on-one teaching means being creative for the sake of the student in front of you.
N — Nourish. This is the step nobody talks about. Once a student has a new skill, we stop and let them enjoy it. We get reps of success. We let the voice student fall in love with the new sounds they can make. We let the drum student reach flow state on her favorite song. We’re not just bulking up music muscles — we’re nourishing the love of music itself.
C — Cement. We make the new skill real by creating a memorable moment around it. Maybe that’s a concert. Maybe it’s a recording. Maybe it’s playing for grandma at Christmas. Performance is great, but it’s not the point — the point is to mark the win in a way the student remembers.
E — Evolve. We reflect on where we started, what we built, and what comes next. Sometimes the next goal is a small step from here. Sometimes it’s a big leap. The caterpillar gets to decide what it evolves into next.
Then we cycle back to Assess, and we go again.
Why I built it this way
I’ve sat with too many adults who quit music as kids and still carry the weight of it. They think they “weren’t musical.” They think they “didn’t have it.” Almost always, what actually happened is they got handed a system that didn’t see them — and they internalized the failure of the system as a failure of themselves.
I never want a kid to leave our studio that way. I never want an adult to start lessons here and feel like they’re behind. I want students to know what they’re doing, know why they’re doing it, and know that the music they’re building is theirs — not a checklist somebody handed them.
ADVANCE is how we make sure of it. Every stage is a guardrail against the things that go wrong in conventional music education. Every stage exists because something important was getting missed.
What’s coming
Over the next couple of months, I’m going to take you through each letter — one post at a time. We’ll start with Assess next: what we’re actually listening for in those first few lessons, and why we don’t start teaching until we’ve done it.
If you’ve ever wondered what makes a music lesson actually work — or you’ve been burned by lessons that didn’t — I think you’re going to find this series useful.
Subscribe to the blog or follow us on Instagram (@musicjunkiestudios) so you don’t miss the next one.
The student is the protagonist. We’re just here to help them figure out who they’re becoming.
— Kristi