A working musician’s studio. A room you actually want to play in.

Lessons happen in a private studio in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village — built around the instruments and tools of someone who plays for a living. Lamp-lit, lived-in, just you and the music.

The instruments

Real instruments. The actual ones.

A real acoustic piano sits at the center of the room. Next to it, a Fender Rhodes — the iconic electric piano you hear on every great jazz, soul, and R&B record from the ’70s onward. Behind that, a Hammond B3, the organ that defines gospel, soul, and post-bop jazz.

In-person students play all of it. Not as a tour. As part of regular lessons. If your jazz piano lesson is about voicings, we work them out on the acoustic piano. If it’s about how Herbie Hancock sounded on Headhunters, you sit at the Rhodes. If you’re working on a gospel-influenced R&B tune, the B3 is right there.

This isn’t a museum tour. The instruments are working tools, used during lessons whenever the music calls for them.

Music with Nick studio in Chicago's Ukrainian Village — upright piano, Fender Rhodes, framed posters, bass on the wall

Recording, when it matters

Capture the moment something clicks.

The studio has a real recording setup — microphones, keyboards, the ability to track and produce finished material. For most piano students, recording is available when it makes sense: a piece you’ve worked toward, an audition cut, something you want to send to a friend or hear back outside the moment.

For voice students, recording is integral. Listening back to your own voice is how voice work actually happens — you can’t hear yourself accurately while you’re singing. Reference recordings throughout the lesson are part of the process.

For musical theater audition prep, that means you can leave with clean recordings of your cuts — captured well enough to send to a college program or build into a finished take.

Reference recordings for self-review, clean tracks when something is ready to share. If you want to go deeper into production work, the studio supports that too.

Recording setup in the Music with Nick studio — condenser microphone, MIDI keyboards, monitor speakers, headphones

The room

Step out of your day. Step into the studio.

Lessons are just you and me. Not a hallway of practice rooms. Not a teacher’s living room with kids running through. Not a music school with other students you can hear through the wall.

Most lessons happen in the afternoon and evening. The room is warm, lamp-lit, lived in — the kind of place where you can stop bracing for the rest of your day and actually pay attention to the music in front of you.

For an hour, the studio is the only thing happening. For a lot of students, that’s the part that makes the lesson work.

Upright piano with open sheet music at the Music with Nick studio in Chicago

How lessons run

Interactive, not lecture-based.

With three keyboards in the room, lessons aren’t a one-way demonstration. We trade. You play; I respond. You work out a voicing on the piano, I play it back from the Rhodes so you can hear it in context. We comp through a tune together — you on the changes, me on the bass figure.

For voice students, the same idea applies — I play, you sing, we adjust in real time. The studio is built so the teacher can be a working part of the lesson, not just a guide standing over your shoulder.

This is what the institutional setting can’t easily give you. A practice-room teacher with a single piano can demonstrate. A working studio with multiple instruments lets you actually play the music.

PhotoMid-lesson, demonstrating from the Rhodes

Online via Zoom

Lessons online work too.

Online students get the same structure, the same teacher, the same rate — same Mon–Thu, 3–9pm Central schedule. What changes is the room. You’ll need a quiet space, a phone or laptop angled to capture your hands or your face, and headphones if possible.

In-person and online aren’t a hierarchy. They’re different formats for different lives. Plenty of students mix — in-person when they can, Zoom when they can’t. Both work.