Scott performs shows every week and when he talks to the audience, the number one conversation he has with older music fans is how much they love to listen to music, yet how seldom listening was emphasized in their lessons when they were younger, contributing to their eventual discontinuation of studies.
This sparked Scott's mission to make learning music as rewarding and encouraging as possible, ensuring that music lessons are always the highlight of a student's day, alongside an emphasis on regularly listening to music, live or recorded.
Scott's teaching philosophy, honed over years of experience, focuses on making music learning accessible, enjoyable, and rewarding for students of all ages.
Scott has taught countless students in the one hundred year history of Brookline Music School! He does this with great care and enthusiasm, teaching and playing “anything that could be in a band” for the past three decades. This includes drums, percussion, guitar, piano, bass, keyboards, folk instruments like ukulele and banjo, and songwriting and recording. This expertise on multiple instruments ensures that students always get a chance to explore other instruments, learn valuable skills that cross-reference other studies, and keep students engaged.
As an educator, Scott has been enthusiastically teaching for 30 years, joining the faculty of Brookline Music School in 2005. He stays at the forefront of music technology integration in education, as evidenced by his innovative recording projects with all his students. This manifests in a vast knowledge of recorded music and ownership of an extensive record collection. After teaching sixty students a week, he still ends each day by going home to play music with his wife. In fact, they have a band together! Scott is always open to collaborating with students to study music they enjoy, whether it be the “classic” standards modern visionaries.
Scott's formal music education culminated in a B.A. in Percussion Performance from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in 1990, where he studied under Neil Grover, Fred Buda, and privately with Alan Dawson (the Ritual!)
Although Scott has played in many popular bands in the Boston area, selling out endless great clubs, students are most excited to find his projects on Apple Music, Spotify, and features in hundreds of YouTube videos. Scott also spent many years performing with several local symphonic and pit orchestras.
Scott's diverse performance background, coupled with his passion for education and technology, makes him a uniquely qualified and inspiring instructor, continually evolving in his approach to music education and performance.