When I first started teaching piano, three bloggers stand out in my mind as pioneers who opened the door to the wonderful world we now know as content creation: Susan Paradis, Wendy Stevens, and Natalie Weber. Susan launched her blog, SusanParadis.com, in 2006.
At the time, I was living in Australia and teaching just a handful of piano students one night a week. Looking back, I realize how little I actually knew. Even then, I was aware of how inexperienced I was—but I kept going.
Thanks to bloggers like these, I had something to hold onto—resources that inspired and shaped my teaching. Ten years later, I had the honor of meeting Susan Paradis in person for the first time at the MTNA Conference in San Antonio.
Sadly, Susan passed away from cancer on March 24, 2024. Today, I feel especially grateful to remember all that she gave to the world of piano teaching. I’m also thankful for the chance to spend time with her daughter, Liz Boyd, who has taken up her mother’s legacy. Liz is not only preserving Susan’s incredible body of work but is also adding her own voice and vision to it.
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Amy
Well, Liz, welcome to the Piano Pantry podcast. I’m happy to be here.
Liz
Thank you for having me.
Amy
Why don’t you go ahead and give all my studio teacher friends a brief introduction? Just let ’em know where you’re from and a little about who you are and what you do.
Liz
My name is Liz Boyd, and I run Susan Paradis Piano Teaching Resources. And I took over the website in 2024 after my mom passed away. It’s a website that provides piano teaching resources. It’s fun, colorful, and engaging. That’s all. Been the point of the shop for a long time. Uh, lots of digital printables. Over the years, the website has morphed into a store. She started it off as a blog back in 2006.
She was really at the forefront of creating digital downloads for piano teachers. And she originally just had a blog, and she gave it away for free, but then, as it grew and there started to be costs to running websites and all that, she morphed it into a shop. And so I took over that in 2024.
Amy
Well, I’m really excited to have you on and to hear about this. I had contacted you in the early days when all this happened and the transition was underway, but understandably, you wanted to wait until you had your footing a little bit more. And I got to see you at the Texas MTA conference this summer, which was the perfect prompt to get the conversation going again.
I just have to say that it was really cool seeing you with a booth. I had never seen your mom have a booth before. Of course, I’m not from Texas, or anything; it was just a one-off that I was actually there presenting. Your mom’s resources have been supporting teachers exclusively through her website for many years so it was neat to see something in person and just see that legacy continue, but also blossom with your hand. And just see things changing.
I have been following her ever since I started teaching piano lessons. I’ve been teaching since like 1999, but it was kind of part-time at the beginning.
And she was one of the early people I followed in the very early days, when I had only a small handful of students. And I was still like a school teacher. And a couple of years ago, I actually did a podcast episode that was a little bit about the history of piano teacher resources, and she was one of those early ones, and I can’t remember if I ever actually got that date, so I’m really interested to know that it was 2006.
So she was one of those early ones along with Wendy Stevens, Natalie Weber’s Music Matters Blog, where some of those ones in the early 2000s. Would you mind sharing even more of that backstory of what inspired your mom to start SusanParadis.com?
Liz
Yeah. Okay. So, um, I graduated from high school in 2005, so she found herself with a lot of free time. And so I went to the local college near us. So, I was still nearby, and I was majoring in Arts and Technology; I think that might have inspired her a little bit to get into creating digital content—like printables, but she honestly had been making printables my whole life before even people said the word printables.
Even as a kid, like if there was a carpool schedule for all the moms, she would be the one making that. My family was very early adopters of computers. So, my dad is an engineer and there was not a time in my life that we did not have a personal computer. We were always a family that really kind of enjoyed embracing new tech. So I think when she found that she had a lot of extra time and she had a daughter who was kind of going into something similar but not necessarily music-based, she was inspired to start a website and uh, it started off with just her writing in a blog of interesting ways that you can engage your students.
And then that turned into her creating printables. And so that was so funny to me. She was teaching herself Photoshop and killing it because at the same time, I had a lot of friends who—we’re diving into Photoshop in our major, and I’m like, “my mom is learning this faster than you are!” LOL And like later when I went on to teach, I also would like say “my mom is blanky blank years old, and she’s picking this up faster than you are.” LOL
No, but, like, she really, really loved it. And so we would bond a lot, like every time we would go get lunch. Since I lived nearby, I left for college, but not that far. So we’d get lunch together all the time, talk, you know, Photoshop and all that kind of stuff. And she was wanting to teach herself how to draw and, so it was just, it was really fun. We really bonded over that in the beginning times, and then it just grew and grew and grew.
Amy
Actually, you answered one of the questions I was gonna ask. I was curious what was she using at the time—and so, Photoshop. That’s really impressive that she dug in right away. And I’m curious—you said that you studied… what was your major again?
Liz
So I studied arts and technology, and I went on to do a career in animation and film—making 3D models for video games.
Amy
And so was your mom an artist at all? Is that part of what made her create the digital resources? Was there art in your family in the background?
Liz
Actually, no! She’s very creative but she was never an artist, but she has a lot of resources that are still on the site that she illustrated herself, like the entire Fun with Frog series. She drew all of that. And I look at it and I just think it’s so cute, you know, and approachable. So, yeah, I mean, I’ve redrawn those frogs a couple of times for other things, but I just love the original frogs. My mom drew and she came up with all of that. She was, a really funny person and had a really fun sense of humor, and so I really see that in a lot of her work.
Amy
Were you involved with what she was doing at all? Like did you know the breadth of what she was doing? Or did you just have this vague awareness of “oh, my mom’s doing this?” What was that like—that relationship?
Liz
I would say yes and no. So, first of all, she would approach me all the time, since I was beginning my budding artist career. She would say, “Liz, making Sunny Solos. Will you draw all the art for Sunny Solos?” And I was so busy at the time, and I was only like 19, but there were a couple of things like the Sunny Solos and, um, some of her, uh, Christmas piano books that she’s done, uh, that it’s my art from when I was 19.
Now I look at it now and I’m like, oh, I’ve improved a lot. Over the last 20 years, you know, but like, I’m like, eh, so I’m always like on the back of my mind, like, maybe I should go through and replace all that art. But I don’t know. I’ve had some piano teachers tell me that they absolutely love it, but I look at it like, oh man…
Amy
You cringe a little bit? LOL
Liz
Yeah, because it’s hard. It’s hard when you’re an artist and you’ve improved. But yeah, so there was a lot of times like that.
But on the other side of the coin, I don’t think I realized how much she had done until I took over, and it was over 300 resources on the website right now that I, I mean, just learning the catalog. I don’t think even other people in my family, like my older siblings—I don’t think they quite know how much, because you know, we had gone off and lived our lives and she was at home creating a whole library of teaching materials.
So I think it was really cool and I love it. And I have access to, um, all of her archived blogs, so I can go through and read everything she was thinking, and it was just fan. It’s fantastic. I’m, I’m really happy. This is such a blessing for me to take over this business.
Amy
That’s so special to hear.
So what inspired you to continue that work after she passed?
Liz
So she had asked me if I could continue her blog because she knew that I always had dreams of starting my own printable website.
It wasn’t necessarily going to be specifically piano teaching resources, but you know, she knew I did that, and I had had a couple of times where I kind of started and fell off because, I mean, I was working a full-time job, so it was hard to have a side gig. And so she knew I wanted to do that, but I don’t think she realized…I think she thought I was just going to kind of do it on the side.
But when I started looking into her website, I realized, this is a full-time job! So I actually took that opportunity to step down from my other career in digital arts video game and at that point I was teaching as a professor at a college, and I’d done that for 15 years. I like—this is perfect.
This combines art and music, which I’m very passionate about having Susan as my mother, you know, that just, that is to my core. Like my kids are in piano. I think everyone should have music education and it combines my wanting to run my own business. So my mom herself, she had actually started off as an elementary music teacher, and she did that for about… I wanna say like 15 years or so. And that’s what she was doing when my older siblings were born.
But when I was born, that’s when she switched into her private piano teaching studio. So I only ever saw her as a piano teacher, but it was around the same age that I am now that she did a big career shift. And I kind of was like, you know what? That’s just what we do in this family. We’re gonna do a little bit of a career shift. And it also has to do with, just like, she had a baby at home. I have, I had children starting kindergarten at the time, and I was like, it’s time for me to work from home. And that’s been a real blessing.
Amy
So I feel like I can see the fact that she was an elementary school teacher in her work and I was gonna kind of ask about that. Did she have a lot of elementary students? Because, you know, a lot of what she has is very geared towards children. So it sounds like yes, the answer is yes. LOL
Liz
Yes, she was, she, just was so good with them because she has such a funny, silly sense of humor and I think it just really spoke to kids and I know I always thought she was hilarious.
So definitely, I think she really enjoyed teaching the young students, but I think what also brought her a ton of joy when she would have a student from, you know, preschool to senior and then they majored in music. That was like, so fun for her. But I would say she was always, like around where we live, marching band is really, really big and a huge commitment, so right around like seventh grade is—she kept losing students to marching band, you know?
Amy
Yeah. So, we can all relate.
So I’m, I’m curious, and forgive me if you stated this when you were talking about the transition earlier, but you said that she asked you to continue her site, which just to me kind of gives me chills.
Did that happen while…did you transition into helping run the site while she was still alive, or is that just something that was her desire that you know, she knew after she passed—as in she was hoping that you would take it over?
Liz
Amy, that would’ve been really smart of us to do that. LOL Sort of like a transition thing. But in actuality, that’s not how it happened because I was still working. So she was diagnosed with cancer and she fought it for five years, which was amazing because when she first found out, we were told she might have six weeks. So we were like, wow, we lived in this state of, you know, any minute.
And what really brought her tons of solace was just hyper-focusing right into this business. And so she wrote all of her Fun with Frogs while she had cancer and so like our family really, we love the Fun Frogs because for us, we look at it and it’s like, it feels like our mom in a book, you know?
Amy
Aw, yes.
Liz
And so, yeah. So, no, I didn’t really, because it wasn’t until I started diving in that I began to realize how big this was. And not only that, I mean her website at the time was ancient—old. It was a WordPress site, and WordPress in the last 20 years has evolved into craziness, you know, I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner in websites at this point. It’s a lot. And so, um, I had to do a lot of educating on myself on how to do that now.
Amy
Is it still on WordPress, though?
Liz
It’s still on WordPress. Yeah. And I would say probably a good 25% of what I do is trying to keep the website running.
Amy
I believe it.
And actually, this kind of transitions me into the next question, which I don’t know, maybe you have a different answer or maybe this IS your answer. What has surprised you the most about this work—about the content creation work? Is it running the website—WordPress?
Liz
Yeah, I think some of it is about keeping the website live, making sure everything works, and having to go through and update a lot of that tech that was on there. It was just, it was just, I had to like go through and replace a lot of stuff, and that’s what I really spent most of 2024 doing, just trying to get the bones of the website.
I heard you wear a lot of hats as a small business owner. But man, do you wear a lot of hats?! Uh, I mean, and, and it’s what’s keeping me so interested and engaged in it, is that no day is like, oh, I sit down and do the same thing every day. It’s the total opposite. I mean, “what am I gonna do today?!”
And it’s, it’s like, you know, between social media outreach, which I am very new to, I’m trying to figure out how to do this. Previously, I was always a lurker on social media, not really engaging. Now I’m on the other side of it.
I think honestly at this point, trying to find the time to do what I wanna do to actually create the billions of ideas I have for this website. I have so many fun ideas I want to do, but you know, so much of my time is taken up with the business side, which is all new to me.
Amy
I can relate for sure. The brilliant thing about content creation and stuff is it’s a creative outlet, and there are so many things, and I’m the same way—I’ve got a gazillion things that I wanna share with teachers, but it’s having the bandwidth to do it. You can’t just say, oh, I wanna share this one little worksheet. There’s a million things that that are tied into that. So, yes, I can definitely relate.
So I met your mom at the 2016 MTNA conference in San Antonio, Texas. We got to have a couple of meals together. I wish I could totally remember it clearly, but luckily I found a little note that I wrote to myself. I was digging through like my photos because I’m like, I know that I met her and I actually wrote a little note on one of the photos and it said
“I got to meet and eat with the amazing Susan Paradis several times. She’s so adorable and funny.”
So I actually I have a couple of photos and I’m gonna show you and will include them in the show notes as well so that people can see them. Let me just share my screen with you. Can you see there?
Liz
Oh yeah. How sweet.
Amy
I was thrilled that I had that opportunity to meet her because, like I said, back in the day, she was one of the early people that helped me as a teacher as well, so it was really, really cool to get to meet her.
And 2016 is actually the year I had just started my WordPress blog—like a week before that conference because it was my my first national conference and I wanted to be able to say, I have a website. LOL
So I started it like that week before, and so it was just kind of neat to me in that moment to be able to meet someone that had been doing that for 10 years already when I was literally just starting it in that moment.
Liz
I don’t think a lot of her friends, her close friends, didn’t realize that she did this, you know. They knew she had a website or something. She had like her life outside of piano and then she had her piano world and it’s so fun now as I’m beginning to learn all about it and people are saying, oh, I knew your mom. It is, it’s really special.
And everyone’s been so accepting of me, because I think that’s something that I kind of came in with a little bit of imposter syndrome of like, “okay…well, I know how to run websites, I know how to make materials, I know how to do this, but I don’t have 50 years of music education experience like my mother did.” You know, I have a lot of teaching experience and all that, but luckily I did have her as my musical mentor.
Amy
Well, in my early days of teaching, I would consider her kind of a mentor in a way. Like I said, I used a lot of her resources, especially in those early days. I think of three things right off the top of my head that were the most helpful from her site. It was the picture scales where she had the finger numbers written on, you know, the keyboard; the note flashcards where you could cut out the flashcards and it had the names on the back; and then resources for running a One-Minute Club, something of which I have actually continued to blog about myself as well. I think the original creator was Jane Bastion, of the One Minute Club, and then your mom had resources for it, and now I have resources for it. I started calling it March Minute Madness a couple years ago myself.
Liz
Oh, that’s cute.
Amy
Yes, another teacher actually gave me that idea for that one, so I won’t claim that title. So I’m curious, what are some of the most popular resources on the website?
Liz
Definitely picture scales. That’s hugely popular. When I went to the convention, I realized I needed to bring those, because the convention was the first time any physical product had ever been offered, and my mom was absolutely not interested in physical products at all. She would not have wanted to go and sell physical copies. She’s like, “why?? We have the perfect system here with the print books?!” Which is true. It is really good.
You know, once you start making physical products, it changes things up a bit. But I’ve worked in digital art for so many years that for me, I was like craving physical copies of things. So I definitely included the picture scales. That was huge. And like the rhythm strips, which is, you know, like, teachers really love coming and seeing and being able to pick up the flashcard versions of things. So the picture scales I had kind of shrunk them down to half pages so that you could put ’em up on the piano. But people love them. They were telling me that, you know, they like to put ’em in their binders and student binders and all that.
We also have anything that is seasonal people love because they’re trying to think of ways to break up the year and do something new. So the pre-reading and Fun sheets, uh, which is what we call worksheets. And so, uh, that’s, really popular.
The Fun with Frog series is popular and that comes in both digital and physical now. So I did have go through and edit it and created physical copies because. That was something that people had been asking for for a long time. So I was like, well, let’s do it. So now I have a pile of books in my other room that, you know, I’m happy to, you know, whenever anyone buys ’em, it’s fun to pack it up and mail it to them.
This time of year, the studio calendar is probably the number one seller. It’s a simple concept, but it’s a really great one glance calendar that a teacher can, edit themselves with their own schedule in the middle, and it has like the calendar for the whole year on either side of it.
So it’s like a one-page calendar for the whole year. And, uh, that’s just hugely popular. And so she liked the one-minute club and the studio calendar; she liked to put out a new version every year with new designs. And so. I think that when she asked me to take over, those were the products she had in mind.
And sure enough, when a word came that she had passed away, teachers started reaching out to me like, You’re gonna keep making the calendar, right? I’m like, okay…we’ll make the calendar.
Amy
That’s funny.
Liz
Yeah. Those are really popular. And then like right now what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to bring up this new idea of a studio kit where it kind of combines a lot of those ideas all together into a monthly subscription.
So every month, I’ll sit down and create about 16 to 20 printables and mail them out to you and they’ll be seasonal. You’ll get fresh new stuff every time. And including fun sheets, studio decorations, motivational gifts—all paper products, though.
That’s been met with a lot of positive reception, and I could see that that could be where the whole store kind of shifts. Although there’ll always be a library of games, ’cause that’s also what I should say, games are very popular as well.
And I think people like that, their printables, because if they lose it or it gets messed up, they can just print it out again—no big deal.
Amy
So it sounds like the future of SusanParadis.com is going to include lots more opportunities for hard-copy resources.
Amy
Do you foresee yourself trying to travel to some of the national conferences, or is it just that people can buy it from your website, and yet you’ll be shipping physical resources?
Liz
I think both. It’ll continue to be mainly digital. But with, with short runs of some exclusive products, it’s probably just because, as a one-person operation, you know. I don’t wanna have to turn my entire house into a warehouse, you know, but, you know, short runs of things.
Additionally, I have created a subbrand on the website called Betty Sue, which is my nickname, as my middle name is actually Susan. But it also pays homage to my mom. So, like Elizabeth, Betty is a nickname for Liz, and you know, Sue—Susan. So it’s like us working together, and that line of products will be mostly gifts and stationery, not teaching products. So, like right now, I haven’t told anyone yet, but on the website, it’s like, I think, like 16 tote bags I’ve designed that people can go like, you know, piano note, tote bags, um, that I tested out at the convention and people liked ’em. So that kind of thing.
I just have so many ideas. You, you have no idea. It’s like, sometimes I wanna call it like crazy Liz’s shop of, of random stuff because it’s like I get frustrated how slow I have to go because I wanna do everything all at once.
Amy
No, I totally understand. I am the same way as a content person. Like, there are all these ideas all the time, but when I still teach, you can only do so much.
Liz
Right, right. And so, and I’m also like, uh. My husband works long hours, so I’m the primary caregiver for my kids. And working from home allows me to do that. So I have to make a conscious effort not to wander back into my studio and start working when I start getting ideas, you know, because that’s, that’s what I wanna do.
And it’s very similar to how my mom was. She would sit in her office and work for hours, and it, you know, we’re like two peas in a pod like that.
Amy
Well, it’s so special to hear. I love—what was it—Betty Sue? Is that what you said? Betty Sue?
Liz
Right now I’m calling it the Betty Sue Art Shop. Yeah. That was something that I was like, how am I gonna make this my own? Because if I’m going to put my heart and soul into something, it can’t be something a hundred percent that someone else, like someone else’s work, you know, is like I need to be able to put, inject myself into this a little bit for me to feel the passion for it, and it’s been good for that.
Amy
Absolutely. And I think that’s kind of a life lesson, too, for anyone who’s continuing the work of someone else.
I think back to my very early days of when I was first a teacher and you know, I took over from this choir teacher that had been there for, you know, 20 years, and what I didn’t learn or I learned after the fact was you don’t go in and like change everything right away and just do what you wanna do.
Yeah. You kind of maintain the status quo for a while, like a, a good year and just the little things here and there and then you start. Slowly adding in things that are what you want it to be and that’s how you transition things in life.
And I’ve seen that happen even in churches as well. There was a pastor that I worked with at a church and, and he did it perfectly. Like, he didn’t come in and just change the service or do anything different. He came in for a whole year and just did the same thing and then he introduced little things here and there and it’s just a beautiful way.
Let that be a life lesson to everyone on how you transition.
Liz
So true. And it’s so funny how it’s like you have to learn that lesson by doing it wrong first and then being like, oh, that’s a life lesson. Because if absolutely, if if someone who’s been there tells you to do that, you’re gonna be like, you dunno me. I wanna do what I want.
Amy
Exactly. Well, Liz, it has been so fun getting to hear your story. I just feel like even more connected to the history of Susan Paradis, and what a special homage—is that the right word? LOL Homage? (Amy pronounces with an “H”)
Liz
Homage. (Liz pronounces with a silent “H” sound)…I don’t know???? LOL
Amy
I should have said something different. LOL
Liz
Tribute!
Amy
Tribute—there you go. Everyone will get a chuckle out of that. LOL
It’s just been really special getting to reflect on her life and get to see what the future holds.
So, is there anything else you would like to share with the listeners today?
Liz
I just want to thank you for having me on here.
I want to thank all the listeners who have come to the website or met my mom. That’s really special to me.
You know, and I’d love for people to, if you, if anyone had met my mom or if their, um, products were meaningful to them at all, I would love to hear it because that really keeps me going, because I will say that sometimes when you work from home behind a monitor.
You don’t always feel like people are getting your message, or so, and that’s why I will continue to keep going to conventions, ’cause that really did fill my cup on that, but I can probably only do like two a year at most. Unfortunately.
If anyone uses the resources, take pictures of someone using the resources and send them to me. I mean, that is, that is truly one of the most magical things for me. I really love to see that, and I know people are out there ’cause they say they do it, but I, you know, if they could share images, that would be really cool to me.
I’m most active on my Instagram. Which is all copied over to Facebook as well. So I’m also active on Facebook and then I have started doing a, uh, a vlog series over on YouTube if anyone wants to watch me piddle around in my home studio, you know, having ideas and. Watching them sometimes work and sometimes not work.
That’s what the vlog is all about. Um, so yeah, that’s, I think that’s all I had to say.
And I really wanna thank you for giving me a minute to find myself in this new phase of my life so that I could say things that made more sense. Because it definitely…I am a completely different person than I was even just a year ago, just because of everything I’ve learned through running this business.
Amy
Well, it sounds like the timing is perfect and I’m so thankful for you accepting my invitation. I’m sure the listeners are going to be thrilled hearing our conversation. Thanks so much for being here, Liz!
Liz
Thank you so much, Amy!
How fun was that? I just loved hearing more of the background of both Susan and Liz’s journeys with SusanParadis.com. Thank you so much to Liz for taking the time to be here. As usual, a full transcript and show notes can be found at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode169
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