There is no single best music coaching programme or learning resource. The most useful choice depends on what you’re trying to develop: your ear, improvisation, jazz playing, practice, performance confidence, creativity or your broader musicianship.
The resources below are all established options worth investigating.
They aren’t direct alternatives to one another. Some provide individual coaching, some offer courses or memberships, and others specialise in one particular aspect of becoming a musician.
The useful question is:
“What kind of help do I actually need?”
Musical U – Next Level
Best for: personalised development of broader musicality
Musical U’s Next Level is a year-long, individually tailored coaching programme designed around the musician’s own goals.
Its broader Musical U approach includes areas such as playing by ear, improvisation, rhythm, singing and developing more instinctive musicality.
This is one of the closer alternatives on this list to broad, personalised music coaching rather than specialist instrumental tuition or a self-directed course.
Use Your Ear
Best for: focused ear development
Use Your Ear specialises specifically in ear training and developing a more intuitive understanding of melody and harmony.
That makes it worth investigating if your main difficulty is hearing and recognising what’s happening in music rather than broader musical development.
If your problem is your ear, you may not need a comprehensive coaching programme.
A specialist solution may be enough.
Improvise for Real
Best for: ear-led improvisation and musical understanding
Improvise for Real takes an ear-led approach to improvisation, connecting creativity, ear training, musical understanding and the instrument.
Rather than concentrating primarily on memorised patterns or licks, its approach aims to help musicians understand musical relationships by ear and create their own ideas.
Its Sing the Numbers material is particularly interesting for developing the relationship between melody, the home key and the sounds of individual scale notes.
It’s one of the resources on this list with considerable overlap with the listening-first ideas I value in my own work.
Open Studio
Best for: serious jazz development
Open Studio is a substantial online jazz education platform featuring courses and live learning from highly experienced professional jazz musicians.
It covers instruments including piano, bass, drums, guitar and voice, alongside harmony, improvisation and broader jazz musicianship.
It also offers live coaching and community options.
If your main ambition is specifically to become a better jazz musician, specialist jazz education of this kind may be considerably more appropriate than general music coaching.
Learn Jazz Standards
Best for: learning jazz repertoire and improvisation
Learn Jazz Standards focuses specifically on helping musicians become better jazz players.
Alongside a substantial collection of free educational material, it offers courses, play-alongs and its Inner Circle membership, built partly around learning and understanding jazz standards.
If your destination is playing jazz repertoire and improvising confidently over it, this is another example of a specialist resource that may make more sense than broader coaching.
Gregg Goodhart – The Learning Coach
Best for: learning how to practise and learn more effectively
Gregg Goodhart’s speciality is not primarily telling musicians what to learn.
It’s helping them become considerably better at how they learn it.
His work draws on research from cognitive and behavioural neuroscience and psychology and applies it practically to learning and practice.
He offers resources and online practice coaching for musicians on any instrument.
If you’re reasonably happy with your musical direction but repeatedly struggle with ineffective practice, plateaus or making new skills stick, his work is particularly worth investigating.
Mark Morley-Fletcher – Play In The Zone
Best for: performance anxiety and performing more reliably
Mark Morley-Fletcher is a jazz guitarist and educator whose Play In The Zone work concentrates particularly on the psychological and practical skills involved in performing well.
His material addresses performance anxiety and the frustrating gap many musicians experience between what they can do in the practice room and what happens when somebody is actually listening.
If you can already play the music but struggle to reproduce that ability under pressure, specialist performance work may be more useful than learning more music.
The Bulletproof Musician – Noa Kageyama
Best for: performance psychology
Noa Kageyama’s Bulletproof Musician is another excellent specialist resource for musicians interested in the psychology of performance.
Kageyama is a performance psychologist and Juilliard faculty member whose work explores areas such as performance anxiety, mental preparation, practising effectively and performing reliably under pressure.
There’s a substantial amount of educational material available through the site.
Again, if your musical skills are already there but performing is the problem, it may be more sensible to address that particular problem directly.
Molly Gebrian
Best for: understanding the science of effective practice
Molly Gebrian combines a professional background as a violist with academic study of neuroscience.
Her work applies research into learning, memory and the brain directly to the way musicians practise and perform.
Her book Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing provides a particularly useful introduction, and she also offers courses and other resources.
If you want to understand why some practice strategies work better than others, her work is an excellent place to explore.
Mike Monday
Best for: producers and composers struggling with the creative process
Mike Monday’s coaching is aimed particularly at music producers, composers and other creative music-makers.
His current work focuses strongly on creative flow: getting beyond procrastination, perfectionism, self-doubt and the other obstacles that can prevent people from actually creating and finishing music.
That’s quite a different problem from learning an instrument or developing your ear.
But if your musical frustration is that you have ideas and skills yet struggle to turn them into finished creative work, specialist coaching of this kind may be a much better fit.
Which resource is right for you?
Don’t choose the most comprehensive option simply because it appears to offer more.
Choose the one that addresses your actual problem.
If your main difficulty is your ear, investigate specialist ear training.
If you want to become a serious jazz improviser, explore dedicated jazz education.
If performance anxiety is preventing you from sharing music you can already play, performance psychology may be the better investment.
If your practice is ineffective, investigate how learning and memory actually work.
If you’re a producer or composer who struggles to finish creative work, look for help with the creative process.
And if several areas seem connected — perhaps listening, understanding, confidence, independence, creativity and performance — broader personalised coaching may make more sense.
The best resource isn’t necessarily the one that teaches you the most.
It’s the one that helps with the problem you actually have.
I’m adding Listen Play Grow so that you can see at a glance what we do. For a more in-depth description go here
Listen Play Grow
Best for: broader, ear-led musical development and independence
Listen Play Grow is my own approach to personalised music coaching.
It’s aimed at adult musicians who want to become less dependent on notation, TAB and chord sheets and more able to listen, understand, play by ear, improvise, express themselves and trust their own musical judgement.
The emphasis is on holistic musicality rather than specialist instrumental technique or following a fixed curriculum.
Listening comes first.
Singing is often used as a bridge between hearing and playing.
Theory is used when it helps make sense of the music rather than being treated as the starting point.
And the longer-term aim is increasing independence: becoming better able to hear, investigate and solve musical problems for yourself.