Rock On, Coral Gables
How To Be a Rock ‘N’ Roller in the Fast Lane
By Rachelle Barrett // Photos by Emily Fakhoury
March 2020
When you hear the words “school of rock,” you probably think of the 2003 film starring Jack Black, a failed rockstar who becomes a substitute teacher in a music class at a prestigious private school. There, he turns the prepsters into punk rockers with his unconventional teaching method of getting them to play immediately, as soon as they learn their first chord.
At the School of Rock Coral Gables, co-music director and instructor Brian Liebman uses basically the same technique. Liebman, a guitar and bass teacher with a master’s in music education from FIU, explains the school’s main goal: to get the students to make music as quickly as possible.
“Basically you can come in, you can take a trial lesson, we can teach you how to play power chords, and you get enough basic knowledge that you can jump into a band class,” he says. “You see, the old way of doing guitar lessons was to have to wait maybe a year. You used to have to learn all the strings, all the notes, all the stuff, and then somebody says, ‘Oh, well, maybe you can come into the band.’ We don’t do that. We start band like day two.”
The School of Rock Coral Gables, though technically across 57th Avenue in South Miami, specializes in teaching kids, teenagers and even adults how to play instruments, sing and create music. The school offers guitar, bass, piano and keyboard, drums, and singing lessons, and about half of its approximately 150 students are Gables residents. The Miami location itself, in the Shops at Sunset Place, is one of 260 School of Rock locations across the world.
Most of the teachers have bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education and music performance. Roberto Giorgetti, one of the school’s guitar instructors, is currently studying at Berklee’s online music program for his degree in film scoring. As a young music fanatic himself, Giorgetti wishes he could have gone to School of Rock as a 12-year-old. “These kids come here, and they want to be here,” he says. “They’re in an environment that makes them want to be themselves.”
Giorgetti gives one-on-one electric guitar lessons to Fernando Vasquez, a 13-year-old who is part of the Performance program, one of the top levels at the school. “One of my friends told me about it, and it sounded really cool,” said Vasquez. “It’s really fun.”
Liebman proved this by teaching me a song riff on one of his electric guitars in a one-on-one lesson. Placing just two of my fingers on numbered guitar strings and repeatedly moving my hand up and down the guitar onto certain placements, I recreated a Lenny Kravitz rock song in less than 15 minutes.
Long live rock ’n’ roll.
