Have you always wished your life was more musical? We have. In fact, we have a neglected acoustic guitar, sadly collecting dust in the corner of our flat, which has been inspiring nothing but guilt for too long now. And since we want to start the new year without guilt, we strapped said guitar to our back and headed over to the nearest music school.
Tucked away on the first floor of the unlikely Hamdan Centre, you’ll find the Amadeus Music Institute. Established only last October, the school is going strong, with over 40 students taking piano, guitar, saxophone, flute, voice practice and various theory lessons. They run group classes (for children) and offer individual tuition as well. To date, their students have already put on two performances, one at Abu Dhabi Mall over Eid and a Christmas concert at the Crowne Plaza. Amadeus also prepares its more serious students for their ABRSM, Trinity and London College exams, with examiners from the London College board assessing pupils on site, come exam time.
Now perhaps you’re keen but still harboring fears of epic failure due to tone deafness or a heinous lack of coordination. You have nothing to lose in trying, because Amadeus offers a free trial lesson before you commit to your instrument. This was most certainly an incentive for us.
A word of warning to the slightly-snobby: you need to look past the drab façade when you first arrive at Amadeus. This isn’t hard to do, however, since Katerina Mircheva and Valeriy Mirchev (the husband and wife duo who teach and run the place) are so warm and friendly. With that said, we got straight to business.
Our guitar tutor was Alex, who welcomed us into the class wielding two classical guitars and prompted our first question: Could we not use our own? We could, but classic guitar is easier and more suitable for beginners. Our neglected acoustic got relegated to a corner once again. Alex knew his stuff though because we instantly felt more in control with our fingers on the classic guitar’s nylon strings. Of course, the mini lesson he gave us in the ideal posture and how to hold the instrument also helped a great deal. No more slouch-backed, tensing under the body with twisted wrist and painful fingers for us. We held that beauty with pride.
Next came a brief lesson in reading notes. Now this is the part we would have objected to, kicking and screaming, all thanks to a certain Colombian from the days of yore, who had great intents and bad teaching methods. But when Alex started, the gibberish little dots scattered across the sheet started making a little more sense. So we breezed through the open string exercise, getting the hang of keeping the beats with a ‘one-and-two-and’. The next part, learning the frets, required a great deal more multi-tasking, because not only are you using both hands (look Ma, two hands!), which are doing two different things at once, but you’re also trying to read the notes and make sure all your fingers are on the right strings. Don’t be put off! It’s more challenging than daunting, and a delicious sense of achievement will follow once you get through that first line with minimal mistakes. Alex’s encouragement and firm prompts were certainly more motivating than those mind-boggling YouTube tutorials we’d attempted to learn from in the past.
Now there’s only so much you can fit into a first lesson, but we definitely felt like we’d learnt a great deal over one hour. By the time we’d completed the third exercise in notes on the second string, we started experiencing brain-freeze. A sign that Alex was right when he said that learning notes on the first two strings for now was sufficient. It was now up to us to do our homework and put in the practice time. And since we’re still feeling musically invigorated and enthused by the whole experience, we’re confident neglected-acoustic will be getting more exercise from now on.
Amadeus Music Institute is open Sunday-Thursday 9am-9pm and Saturdays 8.30am-9pm. Hamdan Centre (first floor), Hamdan Street (050 415 6934).
