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.
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.
So I built a method. I call it ADVANCE.
I’ve been writing a longer series unpacking it — one letter at a time, one post per stage. That series goes deep. This post is the short version: the whole method, in one read, so you can see how it fits together before you decide whether you want to go deeper.
Curriculum vs. 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.
I don’t believe in cranking out mini-mes. I don’t believe one path fits every student. And I really don’t believe the goal of music lessons is to get really good at performing for an audience.
ADVANCE is what I built instead.
A cycle, not a ladder
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 the cycle 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 are the seven stages.
A — Assess
We start by getting to know the student. Not just where their skills are, but what excites them, how they learn, how they want us to communicate, and any past music lesson wounds we need to be careful with. We’re teaching a whole person, not a skill level.
This stage runs before the first lesson and continues every time we sit down with a student. The assessment never really stops. People change. Goals change. What lit a kid up in February might bore them in October. We’re paying attention.
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. The student is the protagonist. We’re the guide. A student who never gets to choose what they’re working on is a student who eventually realizes they don’t actually own this — and stops showing up.
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 the kid learning Riptide was missing. He had no idea what his song was for. Validate is how we make sure no MJS student ever blinks at that question. They know what they’re doing, they know why, and they know what it’ll let them do next.
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. The kid who learns by ear gets a different lesson than the kid who learns by reading. The student processing performance anxiety gets a different lesson than the student who can’t wait to be heard. Same skill, different doorway.
N — Nourish
This is the step nobody talks about, and the most-skipped step in music education.
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 let the piano kid play the song he just learned three more times in a row because he literally cannot get off the bench.
We’re not just bulking up music muscles. We’re nourishing the love of music itself.
To an outside observer, Nourish looks like wasted time. The student is just playing. They’re not learning anything new. They’re not being corrected. They’re not progressing.
But productivity culture has done a number on music education. We’ve trained ourselves to measure progress in checkmarks. Nourish doesn’t produce a checkmark — it produces a feeling. And the feelings are what make the whole thing work. A student who loves doing the thing will practice. A student who loves doing the thing will, twenty years from now, still be playing.
C — Cement
We make the new skill real by creating a memorable moment around it.
Sometimes that’s a concert. Sometimes it’s a recording. Sometimes it’s playing for grandma at Christmas. Sometimes it’s the Friday afternoon at JAM Camp where the band plays the song they built that week, with parents in folding chairs and phones up.
Performance is great, but it’s not the point. The point is to mark the win in a way the student remembers. Most studios think recitals are what this stage is for. We think recitals are one option among many — and not always the best one.
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. That’s the principle. We don’t decide where a student is going next. We help them notice where they want to go, and we make sure they have what they need to get there.
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 I 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.
Where JAM Camp lives inside the cycle
If you’ve been reading these JAM Camp posts and wondering how the camp fits into the bigger MJS picture, here’s the answer.
JAM Camp is a giant Acquire + Nourish + Cement moment compressed into a week.
It’s Acquire because kids build real ensemble skills they couldn’t build in a private lesson — listening while playing, finding their role, locking in with a drummer, leaving space. The actual technical work of being in a band.
It’s Nourish because kids get reps of success they don’t get anywhere else. Every band gets a song that comes together by Wednesday. Every kid plays it again on Thursday because it feels good to. By Friday they’ve played the thing more times than they’ve played any single song in a lesson. The win has time to land.
It’s Cement because the Friday play-it makes the week real. It marks the win. It hands the kid a memory they’ll have. A song they played, with a band they were in, in front of people who care about them. That memory does work for years.
And then they Evolve. They go home from camp and they want to find a friend who plays drums. They want to learn a bass line. They practice more in the week after camp than they did in the three months before it. The Friday performance becomes the launchpad for the next cycle, not the end of the old one.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s the method, working the way it’s supposed to.
Going deeper
This is the short version. If you want the long version — one post per letter, with real stories, real examples, and the specific reasons each stage exists — the full ADVANCE series is on the blog. Start with the intro: How I Actually Teach: An Introduction to the ADVANCE Method. Or follow us on Instagram (@musicjunkiestudios) and the posts will land in your feed.
If you’ve read this and you want to put your kid inside the method for a week — JAM Camp runs two sessions this summer, June 22–26 and July 6–10. Details here.
And if you’ve read this and you want to put yourself or your kid inside the method for the long haul — that’s what year-round lessons at MJS are for. Email me at musicjunkiestudios@gmail.com.
The student is the protagonist. We’re just here to help them figure out who they’re becoming.
— Kristi