The end of year concert can be a lot of work for the piano teacher. It takes a huge amount of effort to find and book an appropriate venue, make sure the majority of students can make it
Last week I had the very exciting privilege of being a speaker at Microsoft’s Ignite conference. This is a technical conference for computer developers in Australia. They called for sessions for a track called ‘Hack@Ignite: Unique Sessions
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series I talked about how to get students to sing, the main goals to aim for in aural skill preparation, and tips on each component of aural tests in an exam. Here in Part 3 I’ll deal with melodic
Recently, I decided to learn the guitar. You would think that given my musical knowledge and background, my good ear and great fine motor skills from playing piano for over 40 years
In Part 1 of this blog I talked about ways to get students to sing more confidently, as well as the three ‘essentials’ for good aural training: Singing, Practising and Memorising. Now, let’s look into some of the sections of the exam more closely.
Hi 🙂 I’m Courtney, Samantha’s daughter. I’ve been learning piano from mum for an extremely long time now, about *mumbles* years. In my experience, she always has some quirky way to get her students motivated to practice, and this
Wouldn’t it be great if there were never any misunderstandings between teachers and parents? Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone was on the same page re things like practice, missed lessons, budgeting for music? In this blog post I
We’ve re-opened the BlitzBooks Aural Survey. If you missed out on taking the survey the first time, please click here to take the survey now.
In the February BlitzBooks newsletter, I wrote an article summarising some of the survey results. This contained some fascinating data, including the fact that professional musicians had only slightly better aural skills than non-musicians. Here, finally, is a much more detailed overview. Just to recap my reasons for setting up this survey in the first […]
A while ago I wrote a booklet containing tips, tricks and techniques which can be useful for those who find the aural aspect of music a bit more challenging. This booklet was only available for a very short time, and only as a promotional giveaway. So I thought it might be an idea to reproduce […]