About
Nimai Walcott is the founder and director of London MADA. Over more than thirty years he has taught piano, violin, guitar, flute, clarinet, cello, music theory, music production, LAMDA and chess — from first lessons with four-year-olds through to diploma-level performers — across primary schools, secondary schools, colleges, youth organisations and private studios.
In 2023 he received the ABRSM & Classic FM Visiting Music Teacher of the Year award, recognising work with students in school settings. He is also a performer and composer, and the author of Learn How To Learn: A Musical Guide to Unlocking Your Potential, which sets out the thinking behind the way London MADA teaches.
“I think of myself first and foremost as a student of learning. Music is simply the best laboratory I've found for understanding how people actually acquire a skill.”
How he teaches
His approach begins with a question — not what solution fixes this? but what principle explains this? A student who cannot manage a passage rarely needs more repetition; they need to understand what the passage is asking of them and how to build that capacity deliberately. Lessons are built around diagrams, analogies and step-by-step systems that make a difficult idea simple without making it shallow, so students leave with a method they can apply on their own between lessons.
That method became the two pathways every London MADA student follows: the Academy Pathway, sequencing technique, theory, sight-reading and graded exams so nothing is skipped and nothing is rushed; and the Artist Pathway, developing improvisation, composition, performance and the search for a musical voice of one's own.
What he believes education is for
Exam results matter, and his students achieve them — but they are a by-product rather than the point. The aim is confidence, discipline, creativity, resilience and independent thinking: habits formed at the instrument that hold up in every other room a young person walks into. The wider mission is to teach people how to learn, using music as the medium for principles that outlast any one piece of repertoire.
Teaches
Specialist availability is limited and allocated each term.