So. I wake up at 6:30 a.m. (okay, 6:50) and catch the bus my school sends to pick up the “lao wei” (foreigner). Get to school, grade papers, teach, eat some food that my wife and I have prepared, and then I come home. Oh, sometimes while at work I check Chiff and Fipple to see if anyone has purchased a new flute and posted a review or pictures (which I especially enjoy).
Often, when I get home, I say to myself that I won’t play until I get my school work–and am sometimes able to do it. Lately I’ve been excited to get my new Terry McGee “Rudall Perfected” keyless in Blackwood, so sometimes I’ll navigate to his homepage to gaze at it. Eventually though, I do play, and even though I don’t have a teacher, I think I’m pretty disciplined about it–Grey Larsen’s book has really helped me here. However, lately I’ve been wondering if there wasn’t some way that I could enlist/pay for a teacher to tutor me online. I know, I know, you’re thinking “what?” But I’m curious, is there anyway/anybody out there that would be willing to try it?
I could send you a compressed soundfile of a tune/tunes and you could give me h/w or make a recording and tell me to add X amount of variations/ornamentations etc—I don’t know. Maybe it’s a shot in the dark, but what do you think?
General comments about how well this might work are appreciated as a reply, specific offers or requests are welcome via PM.
Thanks everyone for all the know how, it keeps me going while I’m here in China.
Matt
Conal O’Grada has/had an online site called Scoiltrad. The site is/was www.scoiltrad.com , but I haven’t been able to get it to come up. The way it worked was, you’d download a lesson, which consisted of a tune to learn. He provided the dots, some instruction on an ornament or two, and a recording at 0.5, 0.8, and full speed. You studied it for a week, month, or whatever, recorded yourself, and sent it in. He would send back some detailed comments and advice.
Have they been found yet, wherever they are hiding ?
The website is unavailable because Scoiltrad went belly-up.
I won’t go into the bit about them continuing to sell products after they ceased operations, which products were never delivered, students never being able to download the lessons they paid for, unresolved refunds, complete unconcern on the part of local governmental agencies, etc. Nope, I won’t. Sigh.
You have a good idea there, though. No need for anything fancy. I think potential teachers may be off-put trying to get a handle on the concept that the student isn’t sitting there with them. They can’t see how it would work.
And it’s certainly not necessary to produce lessons as elaborate as the Scoiltrad ones. At a very basic level, the instructor and student could identify a tune with available ABC, instructor could record it, student works on it, then sends a recording back to the teacher. Teacher then writes his or her comments.
I teach this way. People are forever telling me that it can’t work. Well, it can work and it does work. In fact, for what I teach, it produces better grads than traditional classrooms. But it takes a teacher who can think outside the pencil box.
With music, I think there is more of a need for immediacy of contact, but if you’re unable to achieve that . . . well, you take what you can get.