Teacher Profile: Nathan Paris

About Nathan Paris

Nathan Paris is a music teacher at Lessons in Your Home, primarily teaching the guitar and piano. He has an extreme passion for music, one that goes beyond playing those instruments and teaching. To him, music is a fundamental part of the human experience. A common language and creative way to express ourselves, both as individuals and as a group, and he is always looking for ways to share this inventive and free mode of communication. Whether that is listening to any kind of music he can, or teaching others the basics of instrumentation, to how music can tell a story, this is what makes music so enjoyable to him.

Nate (or Nathan) started his musical journey at a very young age. At 6 years old, he became fascinated watching his dad play theme music on the piano, and decided to pick up an old lesson book and teach himself the basics (Chopsticks!). From there, it evolved into learning new instruments in his preteens, joining the symphonic and orchestra bands at school playing first the trumpet, then later the french horn. When he turned 13, he got an electric guitar for his birthday, a long sought after instrument after being inspired listening to his dad's rock records like Led Zepplin and The Beatles. He took up lessons immediately and joined the school jazz band. As he transitioned into high school, music changed for him too. While he had been performing music this whole time, listening to music was another side of music he dove headfirst into, from movie music to video game soundtracks and everything in between, not just listening to a debut artist's album, and going from performance-based to listening-based as music streaming services started up (Spotify, Beats Music, etc.), adding more dimensions to what he understood and loved about music. This changed his musical trajectory forever, as he started his adult life he went back to school for music, this time for music technology, theory, and production. This would all culminate in the recent undergraduate degree he received this past spring from the University of Washington, with a degree in Music specifying in Ethnomusicology.

Nate's teaching philosophies center around sharing his passion for music and combining that with his vast musical experiences both within the world of learning music and outside of it. Music is more than just a sheet of music or piece of theory, and he knows that a connection to the music is fundamental to succeeding those boundaries. But he also knows everyone has different levels of connection to the art form as well. He has been a student in many different ways (and still is!) from a very young age, and knows how challenging it can be when things don't work the way you imagine, and how helpful it is to have someone with knowledge show support when things like that happen. Having picked up music through various means throughout his life, he knows that music learning and appreciation isn't one dimensional, and if one way doesn't work, there are near infinite other ways to approach the art of music!