Casey Henry
So I’m getting ready to leave with my band (The Dixie Bee-Liners — are you tired of hearing me talk about them yet? Good. Cause you’re probably gonna hear a lot about them from now on.) on a three-week tour of the southeastern US (VA, PA, NC, SC, GA, LA, AR, MO, IL, TX, KY). This, of course, leaves my banjo students high and dry for the time that I’m gone. I feel kinda bad abandoning them for so long. I’ve been gone for two weeks at a time in the past, but never for a whole month.
This time I decided to try something new. I’m getting my students (some of them…the technologically adept ones) to email me mp3s of their playing so that I can critique it and tell them what to work on. I gave one of them a DVD (Banjo for Misfits) and told her to work on the first song. She’ll email me a recording next week and I’ll tell her it’s great, move on to the next song, or I’ll tell her she needs to fix a spot, or polish it up before going on to the next one.
Ginny, my student who flatpicks the banjo, is working on up-to-speed, flatpick-specific versions of the tunes she already knows. We’ve worked out four or five so far. She’ll send me a recording of last week’s tunes, and then I’ll assign her two new ones to work out for this week.
All this will depend on my having access to the internet. Hopefully I’ll have that on a daily basis. If I don’t, it could be one big flop. If I do it could work out to be a really cool way to keep them moving along in their learning while I’m gone. I could even extend it to long-distance students, maybe the people who buy my custom lessons? They could record themselves after they’ve learned the song and send it for critique. Hmmmm. I’ll let you know how it turns out!
Tags: dixie bee-liners, mp3
Duh! Okay, that all sounds good.