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Jane B., California

I encourage them to keep it alive. It’s one of my favorites so I myself like to keep it alive. If I have a student that just doesn’t like it, then I may let them let it go. When they get to the higher levels I usually don’t make them keep songs that they don’t enjoy playing alive.

Stephen R., California

It’s a tough one (that I have not taught yet) even for me to play smoothly, mainly due to the lack of repetition throughout the piece. As well, the pivots and low notes require some execution in tempo.

Kym N., California

It is still a basic C, F, G hand position and sequence with inversions for the melody notes. However, it is the sometimes one note and sometimes two notes and sometimes three notes on the RH that get me. Also, remembering which notes to stay as anchors gets very complicated after the second phrase.

Joan H., Canada

I love playing this song! I haven’t found it more difficult to keep alive than others, once it is learned – and learning it slowly, building one chord after another is helpful to distinguish the 3- and 2-note chords. I use the Lego building analogy for kids, kind of like Neil’s 3-note song as he describes it in Development 12 Prelude in C Minor – anybody can learn it, if you just aim for learning, say, three chords at a time and then fragmenting. Great idea to blend both reading and playing based skills. As for keeping it alive – even at the higher levels, I suggest students always keep the last three Foundations alive, and then they can drop things off, unless they really dislike a piece.

Laurie Richards, Nebraska

Beginning in Level 7, I let students begin choosing much of their own repertoire. Neil recommends this somewhere in the Time for More Music TTMs. He mentions that once they are reading confidently, they should choose their repertoire. I require some songs be kept on the playlist that we will be using for future projects (additional sections like Fur Elise, arrangements, Comp & Improv).

For Church Song, they learn it and keep it alive throughout Level 7. Once they start Level 8, they can opt to omit it from the repertoire if the want, because I do not use it for future projects. That goes for all other streams as well. They just have to have around 40 songs total in their entire repertoire. I think this makes the upper levels more manageable, because the repertoire, consists of their favorites while they are learning a lot of new content including Jazz and theory.

I want to emphasize that this is the way I have chosen to manage the playlist; it’s not required, of course.

Kym N., California

I revisited the teacher videos and heard a few times that Neil mentioned about using the inversions concept from Accompaniment 2 to teach the song if the student is already at that place. I think it is good to teach Accompaniment 2 before Jazz Clues as I won’t be alternating both programs. However, my most hardworking students start Accompaniment 2 around Level 7 at the earliest, as I usually wait until they have finished Time for More Music.