What's a lesson like?

I had one teacher in Grad school who would sit back and just listen to my playing. He'd sip on his coffee, make few comments, and then I'd play the next piece. This went on for 2 semesters, which is why I switched teachers in mid-degree. it caused quite a stir.

I switched because his teaching style did NOT mesh with my learning style - I MUCH prefer a conversational hands-on approach- and that is exactly how I teach.

For me a piano lesson is more of a "rehearsal" - the student and I will work through the issues with the piece they are trying to learn. During that conversation we'll discuss the music theory aspects of the piece - form, chords, melodic phrase construction, for example - as well as technical issues (fingering...) and musicical aspects (articulations, phrase shaping).

I ask a lot of questions - intending for the student to discover the answer (I really like those "Oh, Yeah" moments when the light bulb goes off). It could be something as significant as noticing that the composer re-used melodic material later in the piece to as simple as starting on the correct note.

That's what I think a lesson should be like. Your opinion?

Making a CD: Send it to the studio

Almost done with this series of entries on creating Christmas CDs for my piano students.

To this point I've detailed the equipment, recording process, editing, and graphics creation. The next step: transferring the data to a studio for actual creation of the physical cds.

At this point in the process, I had graphics files for each student's CDs, plus the assoaciated audio files. What I don't have is a way to print on CDs - it isn't something I need to do very often, so the best route for me was to outsource this part of the project. in other words, I hired a friend who has a recording studio - Joey Stuckey, of Shadowsound music in Macon.

Joey offers CD duplication and on-CD printing as a part of his studio services. After a couple of conversations, we figured the best way was for me to email the graphics files to the studio - they also use Microsoft Publisher, so all I had to do was send the original publisher file. I then used sendthisfile.com to transfer the audio files to them. They were MUCH too big to email them, and I've found sendthisfile.com to be reliable, even when using the free account.

Joey and the staff then took the audio and the Publisher files, ran them through their system, and produced the CDs for me. I brought down some pre-addressed CD mailers, assembled the packages (along with a little note from me regarding what this CD was - a low budget Chrismtas card, if you will), and mailed them out.

Next entry: Reactions and benefits