What Teaching Music Taught Me About Making It
I learned to play music by ear as a kidâno formal training, just listening to Dave Van Ronk and Elliott Smith and trying to replicate what I heard. By the time I picked up a guitar at thirteen, I'd already internalized hundreds of songs. I never learned to read music. I faked it in orchestra. And somehow, I kept advancing. I kept growing. I learned funk from Parliament, punk attitude from records, and production philosophy from obsessing over Radiohead and Miles Davis in equal measure. I thought I knew music.
Teaching changed that. Over the past decade, I've taught dozens of students across piano, guitar, bass, drums, and voice. And in the process of explaining to someone else why a passage matters, or how to hear the difference between a sloppy groove and a pocket groove, or why practice discipline is the hidden variable that separates players who grow from players who quitâI learned who I actually was as a musician. Not the self-image I'd carried. The real thing.
This is what teaching revealed.
Fundamentals Are Invisible Until You're Missing Them
I never took fundamentals seriously as a player. I was self-taught and impatient. I wanted to play the music I loved, not spend months on scales and technical work. So I didn't. I learned chords, learned ear training through repetition, and skipped the foundational architecture that most musicians study formally.
Then I started teaching beginners.
Watch someone without fundamentals try to play something they love. Their hand position is wrong. Their posture is collapsing after five minutes. They can't sustain a consistent tone. Their rhythm is drifting. And they can feel all of it. They feel the struggle. And that struggle isn't motivatingâit's discouraging. Because they don't understand that the struggle is specifically because of missing fundamentals, not because they lack talent.
What surprised me was how this made me reevaluate my own playing. I realized I'd compensated for weak fundamentals with ear training and pattern recognition. I could play most things, but I was working harder than I needed to. My technique was inefficient. My stamina was limited. My sight-reading was still a mess.
Fundamentals are the invisible foundation that turns playing from work into expression. Without them, you're always fighting the instrument.
So I went back. Started doing the technical work I'd avoided. Scales, finger exercises, hand position drills. And here's the strange partâI got better fast. Not because I was learning something new, but because everything else I already knew suddenly became easier to execute. I could play with less effort. More control. More feeling, paradoxically, because less of my attention was consumed by the mechanics.
Teaching forced me to understand what I'd been skipping over. And going back filled in the holes.
Groove and Pocket Can't Be TaughtâThey Can Only Be Heard
Funk is where I live as a musician. Parliament, Prince, Thundercat, Anderson .Paakâthat pocket-heavy aesthetic where the magic is in the spaces between notes. Where a quarter-note delay, a slightly late hi-hat, a ghost note that barely registers, transforms the whole feel.
I spent months trying to explain groove to students. I'd say things like, "Feel the pocket. Let the groove breathe. Don't play on the beat, play into it." And I'd see blank faces. Because I was describing a feeling, not a technique. And feelings can't be transmitted through instruction.
What actually worked was this: I'd play the line. They'd listen. Then they'd try it. And I'd say, "Do you hear the difference? That tightness you felt? That's not precision. That's understanding where the pocket is." Slowly, over weeks, their ear would calibrate. They'd start to hear the difference between sloppy and slouchy, between intentional pocket and careless rushing. And once they heard it, their body could follow.
This taught me something crucial about my own music: I'd developed groove intuition through thousands of hours of listening, not through study. And that listening was my real instrument. Not my hands. Not my gear. My ears.
When I moved into production, I realized that same principle applied. You can study mixing theory all day. But the thing that separates average mixes from good ones is the producer's ear for space, for balance, for what's working and what's muddying the picture. And that ear is built through listeningâobsessive, discriminating, loving listening to music.
Musicianship isn't technique. It's the ability to hear what matters and make choices based on that hearing.
Teaching made me prioritize listening in my own practice. I'm not just playing. I'm listening to myself play. Comparing my groove to recordings I love. Asking: where's the pocket? Am I in it? Or am I approximating it? That discrimination is where growth happens.
Practice Discipline Is the Invisible Variable
I can spot the students who will grow in one lesson. Not the ones with the most talent. Not the ones with expensive instruments. The ones who say yes when I explain what consistent practice looks like. Who understand that twenty minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday. Who come back week after week and can report actual progress because they did the work.
I wasn't always that way. I had seasons of intense, obsessive practice (learning 100 songs by ear in high school, for example). And seasons where I barely touched the instruments. I'd get frustrated that I was rusty. That the skills had atrophied. I thought this was normal.
Teaching showed me it was a choice.
The students who had disciplineâwho practiced fifteen or twenty minutes every single day, even when they were tired, even when they didn't feel inspiredâwere the ones who reported feeling stronger after a month. They felt ownership of their progress. And more importantly, they built practice as a habit, not a decision. They didn't have to overcome motivation. The practice was just part of their day.
So I rebuilt my own practice around that model. And it changed everything. Instead of waiting for inspiration, I carved out time each morning. Guitar, bass, piano, voiceârotating through whatever I was working on. Twenty minutes on each. Enough to stay sharp. Enough to make incremental progress. And the cumulative effect over months is startling.
My production actually got faster because I wasn't fighting against rusty fundamentals. My songwriting got deeper because I was practicing on all my instruments, not just one. My mixing got cleaner because my ear was calibrated every single day.
Your Humanity Is Your Instrument
The most unexpected lesson came from the emotional dimension of teaching. I'd go into a lesson thinking I was there to transfer technique. Show them how to play. Walk them through the mechanics.
But the magic happened in the moments when a student would click on something and feel the rush of understanding. Or when they were frustrated and I could reflect back what I'd seen in my own journey: this struggle is temporary, this feeling of being stuck is exactly where growth happens. Or when they'd surprise me with an interpretation of something I taught them, and I realized I'd handed them a tool and they'd immediately made it their own.
That exchangeâthat genuine human moment of one person holding space for another to discover something about themselvesâthat's when teaching became real. And it made me understand something about my own musicianship: it only matters if it's human. If it's about connection.
Ch.1, the EP I released earlier this year, was made in isolation. Four tracks exploring funk, groove, and production landscape without collaboration. And it was the most human thing I've made. Because underneath all the synthesis and recording, the decision-making was rooted in one question: what would make someone feel something? What would make them connect?
Teaching taught me that the technique is just permission to express the humanity. The scales and the theory and the production knowledgeâthey're all just infrastructure so that when you play, what comes through is genuine. It's real. It's you.
The difference between a musician and a technician is whether the person listening can feel the person playing.
Why This Matters
I used to think of teaching as a side thing. Income, sure. Something valuable for my students, sure. But not central to who I am as a musician.
Teaching has reframed everything. Because in explaining to my students why fundamentals matter, why listening matters, why discipline matters, why connection mattersâI'm rebuilding my own musicianship from the ground up. I'm not assuming I understand these things. I'm proving it to someone else. And in that proof, I keep finding new depths.
If you're a musician who's ever thought about teachingâwhether formally or just jamming with a friend who's starting outâI'd encourage you to do it. Because teaching is just another form of learning. It's the deepest form, actually. It forces you to know what you know.
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I built Professor of Funk to make teaching sustainable and learner-centeredârooted in everything this post explores. Whether you want to start lessons or dive into the philosophy, there's space for you.
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