This past week I went to my first in-person workshop since…well, who knows when. It feels like forever, right?!
It was a workshop at Sweetwater Sound in Fort Wayne with Melody Bober. She did a session on practice tips, a feature session on many of her books and resources, and a masterclass.
Today I wanted to quickly let you know some of the places I’ll be this upcoming school year.
The first is the MTNA National Conference which will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota March 26-30, 2022.
I’ll be presenting a 20-minute “One-for-All” session called Reset and Refresh: Tidying Tips for Studio Teachers.
If your local or state group is still on the lookout for some unique and refreshing sessions, check out my speaking page. I only have one or two spots left for the 2021-2022 season!
This month marks a big milestone here at Piano Pantry as I’m celebrating 5 years of blogging!
This platform has been such a wonderful creative outlet and way to “dump” my brain of all the ideas that swirl around. Thanks for being here and for sticking with me!
Today I thought I would share a little about how I got started and highlight some of the milestones along the way (including the release of a new Happy Birthday by-ear teaching resource!).
We’ll also be celebrating with a discount in the Piano Pantry Shop and a giveaway later in the month in Friday Finds #211.
P.S. One of the resources I share in the podcast is my favorite digital recipe manager: Paprika. I just saw they are having a big Thanksgiving/Black Friday Sale that will get you 40-50% off both the apps and desktop versions. I LOVE having the desktop version as well as the app – totally worth it!
This post is part of a series called Your Questions Answered that highlights questions from readers just like you. If you have a question you would like to submit, you can do so here.
I’m trying to set up my RSS reader so I can get my email under control.
If I add Piano Pantry to my RSS reader and unsubscribe my email, will I still get the Secret Letters? I don’t want to mess everything up!
Thanks!
-LB
Hey, L!
Yea for RSS! You’re going to love it. I’m also glad to hear you’re enjoying the Secret Letters and don’t want to miss them! 🙂
That being said, if you unsubscribe from my email list, you will NOT get the Secret Letters. That’s why they’re called “Secret.” 😉 They’re not available to find anywhere online and only go to those on the email list.
RSS is about feeding new blog posts into one spot so you can visit one website and see all the new content from your favorite websites at one time.
I still stay subscribed to a lot of email lists because most of them nowadays send more than just blog post updates. To keep all of those subscriptions out of my inbox I use Unroll.me which I then set up to send me a Daily Digest.
~Amy
It’s all so confusing! How does one know if it’s an email list or a blog post update? I suppose I will have to figure it out! I’ll take a look at Unroll.me. My inbox is out of control at the moment. I was doing well in the email department but somehow I got behind and now it’s a MESS!
One more question for you – how do you remember where to find something later? It might be in the RSS reader, it might be in an email, it might have been in a Facebook group.
Do you have a way to put what you glean all in one place so you aren’t trying to remember where you saw it? No way do I have enough brainpower to remember all that! (I’m guessing you might say Evernote, but I still thought I’d ask!)
-LB
Hey again!
Great question and yes, it CAN be confusing!
You can’t always know until you sign up for a list, what types of emails they will be sending. If you notice a subscription is only sending you posts to your inbox (and you’re already seeing new posts in your RSS reader), then you can unsubscribe.
RSS isn’t so much about completely getting rid of all of your newsletter subscriptions as it is giving you a place to read website content in one location rather than relying on your time in your email to be when you see and read new content.
As far as saving and retrieving your favorite articles for later, Feedly (my RSS Reader), allows you to save (and search) articles – so that’s one good option. You can also send articles from Feedly directly into Evernote.
I try to be very picky about saving too many blog articles, but if I do, you are correct – I save them into Evernote and then tag that note by whatever it’s about such as “group lessons” “apps” “lesson planning” etc.
The search function of programs like Feedly and Evernote is really great so you really don’t have to get super caught up in labeling and tagging articles too much. Just type a keyword into the search box and it will usually find it.
If you’re not already teaching lessons online, many of us will be this week following Spring Break.
I think we can all agree that online teaching can take a little bit (or even a lot) more energy than in-person. Hopefully, the more we do it, the easier it will get!
To help you along the way, here are 10 products I love that can help make your next few weeks feel a little less stressful and a little more comfortable.
Remember, it’s the small things that can bring us joy in stressful times!
Here’s a quick reference guide – descriptions follow!
#1-4 Hydrate and Moisturize
Staying well-hydrated is always important for good health, but we may need to be even more conscious of it now. If we’re not intentionally conscious of it, we may tend to find ourselves talking a little louder than normal, which leads to dry mouth and dehydration.
1
Consider keeping an electric kettle next to you for cups of tea or even warm lemon water. Chef’s Choice Electric Glass Kettle is good quality and well-priced.
2
One of my favorite teas is The Republic of Tea’sSpring Cherry Green Tea. The individual bags are convenient for on-the-go teaching.
Is you Inbox overloaded with emails titled “Person/company name’s response to COVID-19″?
Are you feeling a little bit like you’re in the Twilight Zone?
Do you just want to make it all go away and get back to normal?
Is one side of you glad to know that “we’re all in this together,” and another part of you tired of hearing the phrase already?
Yeah, me too.
Strong Declarations
Over the past week as posts on Facebook have ramped up regarding online lessons, we’re seeing success, generosity, and encouragement, but also escalating anxiety and even negativity.
Several posts popped up of people expressing their frustration with online lessons and in the heat of those frustrations, they declared them to be “worthless.”
I’ll never forget that day. I was at the 2017 MTNA Conference in Baltimore, Maryland when I got a text from a good friend letting us know that a big announcement would be made at our church that Sunday. It sounded really, really serious.
Since I wouldn’t be there, I called him immediately and was shocked to hear that our Senior Minister, who had been with nearly 30 years, was being let go. (The nitty-gritty of the reason why, of course, is not pertinent to this story, so we’ll skip over those details.)
After hanging up the phone, my next outing at the conference was brunch with my good friend (and author of The Varsity Musician’s Playbook), Christina Whitlock, and Wendy Stevens. Bless their hearts, they were very sympathetic to my blubbering shock at the information I had just received.
That is one of my life moments I will never forget.
Fast-forward just over a year. It’s now the summer of 2018.
Our church was going through a formal “transition” process with a company called Interim Pastor Ministries. It was a long process, but the results were well worth it in the end.
During this time, a person in our congregation who had been a worship leader in a previous career had been filling in as our worship leader. After a year he was ready to step down, but our church still had not hired a new pastor and wanted to wait until the new pastor came before hiring other staff.
Thus, I was next in line as the most obvious person to ask to lead the worship team.
This is another one of those life-moments where it throws you a complete curveball.
MY plans for 2018-2019 were to vamp up my work here on Piano Pantry, open up a shop, etc. His plans were otherwise, however, and I am so glad I took the fork in the road.
The Job Situation
Since this was a temporary situation and I already had a job playing for a small Lutheran church in our town, the elders wanted to ensure I did not have to quit my job to take on this role. Thus, it was set up that I was the “coordinator” of the team, not necessarily the weekly “up-front” worship leader.
My duties included scheduling the team, choosing music, putting together all the chord charts and sound files, and rehearsing the band and vocalists every Thursday night and Sunday morning. (Plus all the other little things that get wrapped up into it that you can’t really articulate).
On Sunday mornings, I would arrive at our church at 7:00 am to prep, rehearsed the worship team from 8:00-9:15, left to play at the Lutheran Church at 9:30 (while our worship team led the 9:30 service), then came back and attended our 11:00 service with my husband.
Every 6 weeks or so, I would take a week off from the Lutheran Church (I just recorded the music for them on a Yamaha Clavinova) and would lead worship at my church. Otherwise, we had 3-5 team members we rotated as worship leaders from week to week.
It’s been a whirlwind, but the past 11 months has taught me a lot as it’s been a new and unique experience for me. The only other time I’ve been in charge of music in a church was for two summers after I graduated high school. I moved out of my parent’s house and lived with my aunt and uncle so I could lead music at my uncle’s small church. That was 20 years ago though, and things have changed quite a bit!
This week is my last week in this role and I thought it might be nice to share with you some of the things I learned not only so you might glean some tips, but as kind of a final recap for myself mentally.
It’s that whole “putting a period on the end of a sentence” thing in life where you mark the end of one venture before moving onto another.
Here are a few things I’ve learned over the past year:
1) Appreciate the person who is leading.
Just like a lot of things in life, it’s easy to nit-pick and finds fault if things aren’t exactly the way you would like them. We tend to like things catered to our exact tastes.
There is so much more that goes into the role of worship leader – I had no idea. I learned that I need to appreciate the person who is in that role more and be positive and supportive of that person, even if their “style” or the way they operate things is not exactly the way I would do things.
2) Plan with Planning Center Services
Planning Center is a website for churches focused on managing different areas of the church such as member databases, check-ins for child programs, church event management, and so much more.
One of those areas is Planning Center Services which is designed to organize all things worship-team including team schedules, weekly planning, and file-sharing. We have our own song database, can organize our songs with tags and can see a history of when and how often we’ve done each song. I don’t know what I would have done without it!
Planning Center Services also has a sheet music app called Music Stand that links to your P.C.S. account and syncs your Order of Service playlist so it will create a setlist from your service order. The best part is that if you make any updates to the files, it will automatically update in Music Stand as well.
It even has the ability to connect everyone’s iPad on the team to one “session” so one person can turn everyone’s page at the same time. (This feature never worked for us quite the way we wanted but it’s still a cool feature!)
This past year, I was blessed to have the chance to present to several local associations and state and national conferences. Until about three years ago, I found presenting terrifying, intimidating, and completely out of my reach.
Luckily, my inner drive, curiosity, and motivation didn’t let those feelings of fear and inadequacy stop me from giving it a shot. In return, speaking to other teachers is more rewarding than intimidating, energizing than terrifying, and more within reach to those who persevere (and continually polish those proposals, LOL).
Let’s take a quick peek at those of you I was able to be with this past year!
First Applications of Music Learning Theory
My friend Joy Morin and I have been excited to get our first duo session out there. It’s exciting not only because it’s a session we put together and can present together but also because we’re able to share what we’ve been learning about applying Music Learning Theory in piano lessons.
Earlier this week, I hosted a Facebook Live series that toured various areas of my piano studio.
If you missed it, you can still catch the videos on the Piano Pantry Facebook page. There were several blog posts and items I mentioned in the videos I’ve also linked for you below.
Many thanks for all the encouraging comments and feedback! Now that I’ve finally taken the plunge, I look forward to doing more Facebook Live videos!
than in-person. Hopefully, the more we do it, the easier it will get!
to enjoy after each hand-washing.
