Asheville Music Lessons

This Sunday afternoon at the Orange Peel (2:30pm) the kids from the Asheville Music Schools Rock Academy will take the stage under the leadership of Anne Coombs for the First Annual Benefit Concert for Youth at Jazz. Youth at Jazz is a great organization that has helped many young people have an opportunity to take music lessons and participate in music programs even if they don’t have the financial means to do so. Tickets for adults are $15 at the door. Seating is available and it’s THIS Sunday. Anne did a Radio interview this morning for the Morning Report with Jerri Jameson on WWNC and you can find it in their podcast at this link As of right now, it’s the first item in the podcast listing titled “First Annual Benefit Concert”. You can also find info at the Orange Peel’s site on their December calendar scroll a bit to find it….

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Just a quick note that I’ve updated the Asheville area Music Stores page (and Music education/lessons page) with the new arrival of Dixieland Music Co., in Woodfin. They opened the 17th of October at the Town and Country Shopping Center on Weaverville Highway (Merrimon). They will be open 10-6 M-F and 10-3 Saturdays. Looks like a variety of new used, and consignment instruments (guitar, mandolin, drums, ukulele, banjos). They’ll also offer guitar repairs and lessons for beginners on guitar, bass and drums.

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I don’t know about you, but if you also teach private piano lessons, or really any kind of private music lessons. I suspect there are times you have had to cancel your lessons for the day. You’ve either become sick, had a car accident, or some other event has forced you to cancel your schedule. Well, you might ind your life made easier if you make use of a voice blast or voice broadcast to get the word out. I don’t know about you, but it seems my students have about three numbers each and if you’re not sure which parent is bringing the student each week, then you’ve probably got on the order of 5 phone numbers to call for each student.

For me, sometimes it seemed easier just to go ahead with the lessons then to spend an hour or two on the phone, but you really don’t want to share the bugs if you can help it. That’s why I started using voiceshot (and did a voiceshot review not too long ago.) And here’s another voiceshot review.

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If you like mountain music it looks as though you need to find your way to Chimney Rock state park on August 15. They will host “Music on the Mountain: Songs from the Southern Highlands” for the afternoon at the Meadows at Chimney Rock as a joint event with the Rutherford County Arts Council. It will run from 3-6PM that day and admission is $14 for adults, and $6 for ages 6-15.

Phil and Gaye Johnson and The Dowden Sisters Band are listed the performers scheduled.

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These new digital audio recorders are great. They make it easy to have hundreds of audio clips in short order. The problem is the naming (by default) on the zoom H2 and H4 is STE-000.wav etc…. which can be a little annoying. Organizing my efforts really streamlined what I’m able to do recording wise. Here’s what I’ve done to make my work with these digital recorders easier.

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Sometimes I feel like this time of year is THE Best to make progress on the things you are studying. November and December have the distractions of several Holidays and shopping, parties, etc. It seems that everyone is overbooked. Spring and Summer of course have nice weather outside with their own distractions, but January, February, March are great months to settle down and get into a serious routine (with hopes that it can work into the rest of the year as well.) With the weather being cold outside it’s very easy to stay in and practice this time of year, use that to your advantage and start developing a routine for it!

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I’m sorry I didn’t get this posted earlier, but Wayne Erbsen at Native Ground Music wanted me to let people know about a class they have starting January 13th on beginning Bluegrass and Clawhammer Banjo.

More detail is available at the link above to Native Ground Music. If you’re not already familiar with them you really should be! They produce some great authentic cds and original sheet music collections of “period” music. For instance I’ve got a songs and ballads of the Civil War cd – they strive for authentic instrumentation and stylings.

BTW they also have fiddle and mandolin classes starting up the same day!

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The New Year is always the time for New Year’s Resolutions. I think it’s a good time of year just to look at your priorities and day to day routine and see if you’re doing what you need to do to accomplish your goals. If you’re studying music have you worked practice into your routine? Once a week is not enough to learn something new, you need to make it more a part of your daily lifestyle. I know each and every day likely isn’t possible, but if it’s MOST of the days of the week you will do a lot better long term than just a big once a week cram practice session.

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It seems that there’s always a bit of a gap between the guided approach that most method books take and the approach you need to take when you dig into “real” classical piano literature. Because of that I was very interested to find the First Impressions Music and Study Guides. They present “real” classical repertoire pieces, but give some good “walk-through” sections. (Including a section of things to do in the lesson and on your own.)

It really looks like a good “bridge” series…

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Some of the noise in recordings can come from your equipment itself. Most professional equipment is rated for what amount of self-noise or noise floor it has. One mistake that many beginners make essentially introduces more background hiss than necessary by recording at levels that are too week.

Any professional recording device should have some sort of indication of what the recording level is. In the analog days this was a peak meter with a needle that would swing left to right, many times today it’s a digital meter of some sort.

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