Planning for April

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Immersed In Music got an early start two weeks ago, as soon as Governor Wolf announced the mandatory school closings. Camela, Titus, and Rick Stevens immediately set up schedules for their individual lesson students in vocals, guitar, bass, and piano, and began teaching online via FaceTime and Skype.

Rick Batley spent the weekend building a mini-studio in his basement so he could continue teaching Songwriting, Music Theory, and guitar classes in a controlled environment.

However, it has been the connections with the band students that have been more complicated to work out. The IIM staff met on Google Hangouts last week and brainstormed ideas for how to connect with bands. As usual, this creative and committed group of teachers had a variety of suggestions.

We began contacting families this week to ascertain viable weekly times that individual band members can meet online under the direction of one of IIM’s staff. Plans include everything from giving the students a chance to just hang out and talk/joke/commiserate together to doing serious musical theory instruction.

In addition to doing online individual drum lessons, Wade plans to do bi-weekly drum clinics with all his students, both those from Dale’s Drum Shop, as well as IIM students.  On alternate weeks, he’ll intersperse clinics with “road story time,” in which he will relate interesting anecdotes from all his years as a touring musician. Other ideas that have emerged include giving the students in a particular band one or more songs for them to listen to and dissect for song structure, bands sharing/listening to favorite songs with each other, brainstorming song choices for them to work on individually while away from each other, beginning songwriting opportunities, and learning how to chart songs.

Young Rockers and Advanced Young Rocker bands may simply enjoy hanging out and talking,  practicing counting (time signatures), and playing music games during their times together. Individual lesson instructors will also make themselves available for private, one-on-one mini-lessons for any student wanting to take their understanding of their particular part on a song to a new level.

As everyone transitions to adjust to our world’s current new realities, we at IIM are committed to offering our support to all our students to help them not only get through this difficult time, but use it as an opportunity to continue to connect and have fun with their band friends. We hope that by doing this, their relationships with their bandmates will be even stronger once we are able to get back together.