About Percussion Academy Online
Hi Everyone!
Thanks for taking the time to check out Percussion Academy Online!
The idea behind Percussion Academy Online was created out of our desire as professional musicians. We wanted to have a comprehensive technological resource for teaching percussion. We are private teachers, former band directors, nationally recognized ensemble teachers, and successful freelance percussionists in the Houston area and we’ve had the pleasure to teach some of the most successful students in the state of Texas – our students have consistently placed in honor groups, competitive marching and concert ensembles, and graduated to highly ranked universities and colleges across the country.
The personal discipline required to be a musician has led to our students graduating in the top percentiles of their class and consistently excelling in their academic and personal lives. In addition to our students studying music in college, we have former students studying to be lawyers, doctors, and scientists… even students in the nation’s military academies. We truly believe that studying an instrument has led to the great successes in these kids’ lives and that their achievements are contagious to the community around them. It’s inspiring and incredibly rewarding.
We’d like this to spread.
During our combined 25 years of experience, we’ve found that music education resources haven’t really changed in the last 100 years (unless you count the fact that metronomes now run on batteries). Many books have been published for percussion, but none can really teach a beginning percussionist successfully. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the authors… music requires emulation and mimicry to be successfully taught. Pictures and text don’t get the job done. So when we were designing the kind of method book we wanted to write, we discovered that the problem was THE BOOK ITSELF.
This is all about to change! With the rise of interactive internet technology, cellphone and tablet apps, and online video hosting, learning about anything is as easy as running a YouTube search on your iPhone. Well… almost anything. Percussion and music instruction are areas that are seriously lacking.
That’s where Percussion Academy Online comes in.
What we have designed is a website that is a resource for private studio teachers, students studying at home, and, most importantly, band directors and school music teachers. The website will be broken down into small, achievable skill areas, starting from the basics of setting up a drum and holding sticks, all the way to advanced playing on multiple instruments – snare drum, drum set, keyboard, timpani, and accessories. Each skill area will contain one instructional video, usually less than 8 minutes long, describing the technique in great detail, including things to look out for and good habits to reinforce. In addition, there will be a multitude of exercises for each skill and musical studies, or etudes, which will help the student incorporate that skill into their wider repertoire. Each exercise and etude will come as a PDF document that is written in traditional notation – and also a new visual notation, specially designed for Percussion Academy Online. Play-along-videos accompany each document, so the student has the opportunity to emulate the sound and motion of the teacher in the video.
When practicing at home, students have access to embedded metronomes and timers to help govern their practice, as well as progress trackers to encourage them. They can access these things from a computer, or their phones or tablets. All of these resources feed into the teacher interface on the website, allowing the private lesson teachers and band directors to keep the students accountable and track them. They can even accept assignments in video format and give feedback without ever having set foot in a classroom!
Most importantly, we will be offering video feedback from our staff, Skype lessons and masterclasses, and educator support for everyone that subscribes to the site. We’ll also build a video recital hall, where budding performers can play for their peers across the world. Every student benefits not only from their instruction and study of music, but also from having a tangible end goal and a way to share their experiences through expressing music.
We’ve already written a comprehensive curriculum for the first year of instructional study. This includes all necessary theoretical and rhythmic notation, as well as all the percussion-specific techniques. We’ve already created videos for the basic Snare Drum Curriculum and are in the process of producing the rest, as well as starting on the Mallet Curriculum. The entirety of the Snare Drum Curriculum has been tested in a public school setting and we’ve had great success. The students, primarily ages 10-12, responded really well to the videos and were engaged and positive the entire time. If you’ve ever worked with this age group, you know what a challenge that can be. Making learning music as easy as watching your favorite internet cat video seems to be the key here!
Your Contribution
This is a system that really works! We just need your help bringing it to the internet. We have the experience, curriculum, and the basic materials to produce the videos. Your contributions will go directly to funding website design and implementation. The aforementioned features include:
- All video and instructional content, available via computer, phone, or tablet.
- Metronomes, timers, trackers, and other practice tools
- Online lessons, recital halls, and Skype feedback
The back-end programming for the site is extensive and requires a large database, because the students’ logins can all be linked under a teacher’s account or used independently. The teacher will be able to hide and share content within and outside the website, as well as give the students the necessary feedback.
Up to $10,000 – 100% of your contribution will go toward funding the design and programming of Percussion Academy Online. A small amount may be used to help pay for contributor incentives.
Above $10,000 – your contribution will be used to purchase better film making equipment, specifically a professional quality video camera and editing tools.
Everyone who makes a contribution will be thanked personally and listed on the website in perpetuity.
Impact
This project is primarily designed for schools and teachers that don’t have access to quality percussion instruction. Too often, we run into band directors and private teachers that are incredibly motivated, but lack the tools to make percussion a reality. It’s not easy teaching percussion if you’re a clarinet player! This is for them, but it’s also for areas outside the larger cities or metropolitan areas. In Houston, we have access to the University of Houston and Rice University… but as you start getting further from city center, you lose access to these resources. This is even more evident in less-populated areas. If you get into places like West Texas, Southern Louisiana and Mississippi, or rural Kansas, access to quality instruction is sometimes nonexistent.
In addition, even the populated areas are seeing budget cutbacks at the local, state, and federal levels, which often make fine arts education prohibitively expensive.
This project is important to us, not just as musicians and teachers, but as citizens. A well-rounded student has to be versed in creative activities. This is one of the few things that leads to an inventive population that thinks outside the box to address the world’s challenges.
“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” – Plato
Other Ways to Help
If you’re not able to contribute monetarily, or you’d like to help out in other ways, you can:
- Please message or email us with comments and questions. If you have great ideas that you’d love to see included, let us know! -- percacademyonline@gmail.com
- Share this campaign on
- Help us get the word out! Email other people, call your friends and family, talk it up in your knitting circle… heck, send smoke signals! Just help us make this as successful as possible.
FAQ
Who are we?
We are Grant Beiner and Brady Spitz. Grant is a graduate of the University of South Florida and has a master’s degree from Rice University; Brady is a graduate of the University of North Texas and has a master’s degree from Louisiana State University. Grant is a former band director and we are both private teachers in the greater Houston area. We have a combined 25 years of experience teaching and playing, having both been professional freelance players with some of the most prestigious groups in the country, including the Houston Symphony, the Louisiana Philharmonic, and with various musical theater companies in the Southern US.
I live outside the US – Can I still donate?
Yes please! You can donate, though only in US Dollars. There is a PayPal option to make a donation if you can’t donate through an international credit card.
Delivery of perks
Almost all of the incentives for Percussion Academy Online deal with our instructional content. This content will be made available after the completion of the website, before the end of 2013. All non-content incentives will be made available in the same time frame.
What if I just want to donate and not receive a perk?
That’s not a problem at all… there’s an option for you to select. Just click on any perk and it will take you to the next step, where you can select this option.
Why raise money this way?
Crowdsourcing is a great way to keep freedom of content and minimize the amount of legal hassle that it takes to bring YOU, the consumer, to our product. It’s also a great way to get feedback from you during the formative stages of our company.
What makes Percussion Academy Online different from other music websites?
Most music websites deal only with music theory or songs; they don’t often talk about how to play your instrument. Several other websites talk about how to play your instrument, but they are designed primarily for wind players and vocalists. The few percussion sites available are geared toward advanced drum set or marching percussion. Both of these activities are great, but you need to already know how to play in order to take advantage of them. Percussion Academy Online is geared towards taking you from setting up your first practice pad to playing some of the most difficult literature available to high school and college students.
What type of content will you provide?
Our content will be in form of PDFs and instructional or play-along videos. To give you an example, our first year curriculum will contain all of these skills:
Snare Drum:
- Four Basic Stroke Types
- Accents and Dynamics
- Buzz and Double Stroke Rolls
- Flams and Drags
- Introduction to Rudiments
Mallets:
- Full Stroke
- Horizontal Shifting and Transitional Motions
- Chromatic, Whole Tone, and All Major Scales
- Accents, Rolls, and Grace Notes
- Scalar and Arpeggiated Patterns
Timpani:
- Grips
- Stroke Types
- Sound Production and Playing Zones
- Tuning
- Rolls
- Dynamics
Accessory Percussion:
- Tambourine
- Triangle
- Crash Cymbals
- Bass Drum
- Suspended Cymbal
- Castanets
- Concert Toms
- Chimes
- Wind Chimes
- Temple Blocks
- Wood Blocks
And this is just the first year! After the initial launch of the website with this content, our next goal is to complete a 3-year curriculum. Content will be uploaded as frequently as possible until we have a curriculum that takes a student through all of middle school and high school (approximately 7 years).
Will you only have technique, or can you teach songs as well?
Yes! Starting in the summer, we will start recording instructional videos for the All-State and Region contests in our area. This will form the basis for a database of lessons on specific pieces of repertoire. Our drum set curriculum will include videos on learning jazz standards and how to play famous rock and pop rhythms.
Can I contact you directly?
Absolutely… you can contact us via social network at
Or you can email us personally at percacademyonline@gmail.com