Providing Students With Music
Found in: Accompaniment, Studio Management
Mei W. Canada
I would welcome feedback. During the Accompaniment program, how do you approach teaching music pieces outside of the Simply Music curriculum.
1. Do you provide the music pieces or do they bring one of their own?
2. Is this a licensing issue? If I purchase music i.e. from Musicnotes.com, the piece is for myself to use and not studio wide to distribute to my students. Is this correct? If yes, what would you recommend instead if this practice?
3. My thought is having the students bring their own music specifying that they search out easy chords they already know.
Robin Keehn, Washington
You have a few options. First, you can just ask students to come with their own music. They can bring piano-vocal-guitar books, fake books, lead sheets, guitar chords. This would be their responsibility and it is incumbent upon them to purchase music or to find music that is public domain. I don’t ask specifically how they got their music but I also make sure they understand that most music is copyrighted. I don’t make copies for my students from our collection of books.
There are lots of places where you can just print out the guitar chords for popular songs. I’m not sure how this fits into the legal issues of copyright. Maybe someone knows what the implications are….I don’t print them out for my students–I ask that they do that.
You could also collect some fake books (Hal Leonard publishes LOTS of fake books) and loan them out or sell them.
Simply Music may sell music as well on the website. You can search for songs and download them.
Finally, sometimes my students will like a piece and we’ll listen to it on YouTube and figure out the chord progression. That is actually pretty fun because most pop songs are very predictable and they can pretty quickly identify the I, IV and V. If you do it that way, you can also help your students figure out the into, outro and fills and make it sound like the recorded piece.