Trevor M.

I'm willing to teach all the anatomy, basics and tunings of the instrument, but I can also do some more formal training if they'd like, like how to read music, including various clefts, time signatures, keys, note ranges, scales, arpeggios, etc. While my passion and expertise lies in alternative rock, I'm also willing to teach pretty much any form of popular song and any particular song the student would like!

While I'm not an absolute expert on vocals or the anatomy that enables singing, I at least have taken two and a half years of private vocal lessons with highly acclaimed instructor Luann Ewbank, who is also a regular private teacher and piano accompanist at various local high schools, mostly in the McKinney area. During our lessons, I learned how to shape vowels and sing from my diaphragm, which came in handy when I learned how to sing both opera and some of my favorite alternative rock songs with said teacher. Once a semester, I had to perform one piece of opera and one rock song at Ms. Ewbank's private recital for her students and parents. All of this experience and these skills came in even more handy when I spent a year in college singing in Southwestern University's highly acclaimed a capella group Sailors and Sirens. Using all of these years of experience, I can teach any interested student, when singing, how to properly round out their vowels, have correct posture, sing from their diaphragm, and just generally deal with performance anxiety. As someone with medically diagnosed social anxiety who typically has to take beta blockers before every music performance, I can especially understand this latter problem. Having been there too many times before and choked in the middle of one too many performances, I would love to assist anyone willing to grow into a better performer!

I first began attempting to write songs when I was around eight years old, and songwriting has remained one of my primary and strongest passions ever since! Songwriting is one of my most favorite and best ways of emotionally and artistically expressing myself and just sharing my personal stories with the world. While I've been experimenting with songwriting ever since the age of eight, this love, unsurprisingly, eventually led me to seek out both rock/pop based and classical music theory training in high school and to attain my Bachelor's of Music in Music Theory/Composition during college. While I specialize in rock/pop and classical music, I'm willing to teach any music lover how to write practically anything they want. I can teach any willing student how to come up with stories or themes for songs, how to unlock the potential of ideas they already have, how to structure and pace their songs, how to compose good melodies/themes and develop and expand upon them, how to harmonize your music, etc., and am academically trained and certified in how to do all of this and more regardless of genre, style or instrumentation

With an immense passion for orchestral and classical music since I first started taking viola lessons and joined an orchestra in the sixth grade, I'm willing to teach any interested student anything they would like to know about the orchestra in general, whether it be in regard to instrumentation or general music composition. My years of collegiate training in music composition and orchestration have gifted me with expertise in how to select which instruments to use at which points in whichever pieces and how to balance their sounds and volumes so that they don't drown each other out and the composer's ideas are made clear. With five months of collegiate conducting training under the highly acclaimed and certified orchestra director Dr. Lois Ferrari graduate of Eastman School of Music and current orchestra conductor for Southwestern University and Austin Civic Orchestra, I can also teach any interested student how to conduct an orchestra or symphony!