Podcasts are becoming more and more popular. Most of them are free and they are a great way to share your knowledge and expertise with people everywhere. There are many other benefits as well. If your podcast is popular enough you may be able to charge a subscription fee to everyone who wants to download your podcast. If you have developed your own teaching materials or compositions you can promote these through your podcast. You may even reach some new students through your podcast.

There are lots of formats for podcasts. You could create a series of informative podcasts about your instrument, answer questions submitted live, perform your own music or share the music of your students (with their permission).
But, how do you create a podcast? There are lots of posts on the web that will tell you in great detail how to create a podcast step by step, but I’ve discovered a site that takes all of the hard work out of creating a podcast and makes it really simple. Its called TalkShoe. As an extra bonus, you can even produce a live talk cast. People can call in and ask you questions about the topic or subject you are discussing. TalkShoe will pay you a few cents for every live caller and download or your podcast. Its not much, but it can add up.

Simply go to www.talkshoe.com and register, you will need to download the talkshoe software. Then click create to get started. You will describe your new podcast and create a schedule. Next record the podcast. You can either do that live with the talkshoe software, or you can record the podcast with a software like Garageband (which comes standard with most Macs) or Audacity and upload the mp3 file to your talkshoe account.

Your podcast is then available to the listening audience at talkshoe.com, but with a few simple clicks you can list it on itunes, google, yahoo, newsgator and many more podcast listings. You can create an archive for your web page as well. There are easy to follow instructions on TalkShoe so I won’t reinvent the wheel.

Next week I will talk about how to plan your podcast.

A student in a class of mine inadvertently pushed me to discover one of my most useful teaching tools: a digital dictation machine, for recording music. I’ll tell you how I’ve come to use it for teaching, and also some teaching uses for it that I haven’t tapped into yet myself.

What happened in my class was that this particular student digitally recorded music I played while demonstrating during class, and then, knowing that some of the other students had not taped anything in class, he would help them out by emailing them copies of my playing.

He was considerate enough to send copies of his emails to me, and this is how I realized that there were several problems with this scenario. First, the recordings weren’t exactly the samples I would choose to send to my students. Second, when emailing the recordings, my student added text comments of his own which did not always highlight what I thought was important, or sometimes even misinterpreted what I had said in class.

The third concern is much more indirect, and reasonable people can differ about this one: there was no attribution in the recordings. In this digital age, we all deal with the fact that once information is out there on emails, it can go anywhere, forever. (This concern is not limited to digital information, of course. Not long ago, a student came to me asking if I’d ever heard the music on a sheet he showed me. I took a look, and lo and behold, the music was in my own handwriting! It had made the rounds without attribution over the course of a decade.)

A New Offering to Students

My answer to the situation in my class was to offer recordings myself, with samples played the way I wanted them, and accompanied by appropriate text where necessary.

To do this, I had to find a convenient way to make the recordings, and came upon an amazing digital recorder made by (more…)

The internet is a veritable treasure trove of resources that music teachers can use to help them do their job better. During my most recent treasure hunting, I found a site that allows you to create online newsletters, an article search engine that finds and lets you read articles online, and a way to help your students find the music that you use in your studio.

Looking for an article to share with your students? You can look online at findarticles.com. Find Articles is a site that allows you to search magazine archives for words. Many of the articles are free and available to be read online. American Music Teacher Magazine and Music Educators National Conference have several helpful articles listed there.

If you’ve always wanted to create a monthly studio newsletter, but don’t have a lot of technical expertise or money to spend on postage, LetterPop is for you. It is a website that allows you to create your newsletter and distribute it entirely online. You can also print it out and give it to your students in person.

This website is well organized and easy to use. You create a basic account and login to create your newsletter. Then all you have to do is select your template, enter text and upload and insert pictures. There are a lot of great templates that you can use to create your newsletter. They are organized by category, so you can choose one to fit the occasion. It even has holiday specific templates. Basic Membership allows you to have 25 contacts for free. You can upgrade your account to allow you to have more features and send the newsletter to more people. If your students do not wish to receive the email there is an opt out link included in each email. You can store your newsletters online as well. They will be adding an invite feature soon, so you can email all of the music directors in your area and invite them to join your newsletter mailing list.

Many teachers have a list of books that they use in their studio, but how about an online list that students can simply click on to order the music? Sheet Music Plus has an affiliate program for teachers that allows you to create your own store online. (As a plus you earn a percentage of the sales that occur through your store.) You create a list of music that you use in your studio using their store creator page and select the type of links that you would like. You can create multiple pages for different instruments or levels that you teach. Then simply paste the html code that is created for you into your website. You can paste it onto a separate page and link to it from your Music Teachers Helper Links page.

Lots of musicians I know are curious about what I do for a living. They have never considered teaching, and even if they did, they don’t know where to begin. I was there once, so I want to share with you some of the things I have learned along the way.

YOU’VE GOTTA START SOMEWHERE

Getting the word out is the obvious first step. The place to start is your local schools. Getting a teaching gig at these schools is the fastest way to gain more private students. If you can’t get an actual job on the faculty (which would really speed things up, by the way) then offer to teach after school lessons. Most schools are interested in this, and many are already doing it. Keep your price competitive to the going rate. If you want to charge more, wait until you have a few students for awhile, and then raise your fees.

Another thing you can do with local schools is contact the music teachers at those schools. I once got a big envelope sent to my school job that was filled with flyers and a letter from a local brass and wind teacher. She was looking for private students, and lo and behold, I don’t teach those instruments, nor do I know any brass and wind teachers. Her letter was very professional and her flyers were clean and easy to read. So of course I let my students know about her. That was a very good marketing idea.

Another place to find students is (more…)

In teaching any students, but especially beginners or when teaching music by ear, it is very useful to be familiar with scales and arpeggios. These patterns help us group notes so that we don’t have to think about each note individually.

For beginners, scales help confirm what it means to play “up” and “down” from one note to another. It’s amazing sometimes how long it takes for some beginners to feel comfortable with “up” and “down”, especially adults who sometimes second-guess themselves.

But there are more scales out there than we usually think about, and they can be useful for students of all levels. For example, beginners can easily work with pentatonic scales, which limit the number of notes they have to work with while still yielding beautiful melodies. Advanced players can certainly benefit from a familiarity with pentatonic scales as they create moods from major pentatonic with a country sound, to the minor pentatonic with its bluesy feel.

The major pentatonic is generally notes 1,2,3,5,6 of the major scale, while the minor pentatonic uses the same notes starting on relative minor, resulting in notes 1,3,4,5,7 of the minor scale.

But that’s only a beginning. Classical major scales, and the melodic and harmonic minor scales are essential learning because they are so commonly used.

Then there are the modes, which may seem to arbitrarily start on different notes of the scale, but also happen to represent common scales from different cultures. They can sometimes be best understood in this cultural context rather than as musicological theory. For example, (more…)

For a while now notebooks or binders (that a student brings with them) have been the best way to plan and track lessons. The one problem with this system is that the student has to remember to bring the notebook with them to the lesson. If they forget, then there is no back-up. However, it takes extra time to update both your notes and their notebook. That is until now.

nFinity has created an inexpensive program called Quick Voice which allows the user to record voice memos on their computer. The voice memos can then be sent as emails, mp3 files or saved on the desktop as a sticky. It is available for both Mac and PC users for about $25. For private lesson teachers this is a great tool! Simply hit the record button at the end of the lesson when you recap the lesson for your student and you will have a file that can be saved as an audio sticky in a file. You can then review or type lesson notes from the recording later. You can enter the lesson notes on Music Teachers Helper and automatically email the notes to the student or parent. The files can also be saved as a Quick Time movie or MP3 file that can then be saved on your file area on Music Teachers Helper for the student to access when the log in or emailed to the student as a reminder of what they need to work on… in case their notebook comes up missing.

For more information about this software visit
http://www.quick-voice.com/

Do you have a passion for music, teaching, or writing? Do you have experience and insight you’d like to share with other music teachers across the world? Do you want to make yourself known in the music teaching community? Or would you like to be the catalyst for interesting musical, educational, technological, or business discussion?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then send us an email! We are looking for additional bloggers to write articles or posts that will be of interest to music teachers. Our goal is to provide an even more valuable resource and community for music teachers here on our blog.

How often you want to write is up to you. Anywhere from one article per month, to several per week will be fine. If you’re a current Music Teacher’s Helper subscriber, compensation will most likely entail all or part of your monthly subscription fee being waived (yes, you get a free Music Teacher’s Helper account!), and possibly more depending on the frequency and quality of your posts.

To apply, just send us an email explaining your writing experience (none required, we’d just like to know) , how frequently you’d like to post (ie. once a week), and some ideas you have for interesting post topics. We may bring on several individuals, so if you’re at all interested, don’t hesitate to send us an email.
We look forward to hearing from you!

To help new users learn how to use Music Teacher’s Helper, and to help everyone learn the capabilities of the new invoicing system, we’ve added six video tutorials, which walk you through step-by-step how to perform all the major functions in Music Teacher’s Helper.

Here are the tutorials we’ve added:

• Overview of Music Teacher’s Helper
• Adding students to Your Account
• Using the Calendar
• Billing and Transactions
• Invoicing System

The videos are each between 5 and 11 minutes in length.

To watch the video tutorials, login to your account, and click the “Help” menu, then “Video Tutorials”.

Enjoy!

Hooray! The new invoicing system is up and going. Both manual invoicing and automatic invoicing have been greatly improved, giving you a lot more control over how invoices are generated. Thanks again for everyone’s feedback that made these changes possible.

Important Note: If you use automatic invoicing, you’ll need to create a new invoicing schedule in order for automatic invoices to be sent out, since we couldn’t migrate the old automatic invoicing settings to the new system. We were able to migrate all of the invoices in your history to the new format, however, so it’s just the schedule you’ll need to create.

We have also added several video tutorials, one of which covers the invoicing system. These walk you through step-by-step how to use the different parts of Music Teacher’s Helper. You can watch them by going to Help -> Video Tutorials (after you login, of course).

Let us know what you think of the improvements!

Thanks and have a great day!

How we think about musical mistakes has a huge impact on how we practice, how we learn, how we perform.

One student told me that when she makes a mistake, it’s like falling off a bicycle. Another said it’s like finding herself down the wrong path in the woods. Still another says it’s like tripping on a tree root while hiking. Or like hitting the wrong floor button in an elevator.

Or is it like dropping tomato sauce on a white sleeve, or dropping the wrong ingredient in a recipe? Maybe it’s like saying the wrong word in the middle of a speech, or like missing a fly you’re trying to swat.

Choosing a response

Each of these possible ways to think of musical mistakes implies a completely different response. It may well be that each of your students thinks of mistakes a very different way and therefore responds differently to them.

Do you want a student to feel derailed by a mistake and have to start over, hoping to get it right the next time? Or should they catch themselves after tripping and keep hiking?

Is a musical mistake sometimes equivalent to having taken the wrong trail, and if so, do we start over, or go back 20 feet, or do we go back to a meaningful fork in the trail and choose the right path?

If we hit the wrong button on the elevator, are we humiliated, get out and wait for another elevator, or do we hit the correct button without thinking twice? Is making a mistake like a stain we can’t clean, or a wrong ingredient that ruins the flavor of a recipe–or is it a mispronounced word that is forgotten as the flow of ideas moves forward?

The Donut or the Hole?

Some students seem so worried about hitting the wrong note or making a bad sound that they sound like they are tiptoeing through the music, afraid of being mugged by a mistake. Since there are always going to be mistakes, (more…)