Our music education
Blog
for parents and students.
Are you new to the music scene and curious about how this all works? Are you eager to start exploring music, but o all those lines, dots, and squiggles on the page have your brain in a tailspin? Although learning to read music can seem like an overwhelming task at first, with the help of the right instructor, you’d be amazed at how quickly interpreting those hieroglyphs can become second nature.
Today we have the opportunity to share another installment in our “Instructor Features” blog series! This week we have Carly Erst to celebrate! Carly is a violin, viola, cello, double bass, and music theory instructor who is currently studying music composition at Butler University. Carly is passionate about instilling a sense of enthusiasm in her students and helping them take the lead in exploring music for themselves.
No matter the age, music theory can be made into an fun and enjoyable subject. Even though we at Vibe love getting nerdy and possibly talking too long about all of the theoretical knowledge we geek-out on, we are careful to present music theory in our lessons with a completely understandable approach for even the youngest ages. Here’s a fun way to supplement your student’s learning in music theory with none other than… a pizza!
Are you tired of playing the same old chords over and over again, only to produce the same sound? There are always additional notes we can add to chords to add much more “flavor”. In fact, music wouldn’t be the same today without the bold inventions and creativity of artists with unconventional chords. The list of available combinations of notes to form a chord (any three notes played at the same time) is very long, so for the purposes of this article we will explore the most basic options.
A lot of students have a hard time reading and understanding rhythms. We're talking quarter notes, eighth notes, whole notes, etc. All that stuff is so crucial to a music student's success, but it can be tricky to grasp when they're first learning what it all means.
I used to struggle to try to have my students memorize all these note names and their beat duration, until one day - out of thin air - I thought of a little visual explanation...
