December Recital 2023

This year we collaborated with Kat’s and Sara’s students to create a winter-themed song that students had input on. Kat arranged it using students’ lyrical themes on winter, chord structure and fiddle riffs. Then we all played it together!

SugarFest!

We had a great time in Hope for the kids show portion of SugarFest!  A small but enthusiastic turnout jammed tunes with some of the band members before the evening show.  The dad joke competition was packed with mediocre humor and it was so fun to play music again for the first time as a new mom!  Hope to do it again next year.

September Music Jam

The Nave is a wonderful community space in Spenard and turned out to be a great place to host our fiddle/ guitar jam session this past September! Very spacious indeed, we had a beginner jam that slowly morphed into an advanced jam. Excited to do more of these next summer on our studio lawn!

August Porch Jam

The last of the Spenard Yard sessions! It was fun stretching out in the new yard and playing together this summer! The Super Saturated Sugar Strings had a great time playing at the Palmer Alehouse the following night. Not sure what the winter recital will look like this year, in the meantime, stay safe everyone!

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1st ever Porch Jam!

First porch jam of the year! It was small but so nice to hear students playing together in real time. Looking forward to the next one, Friday July 16th! Thanks for breaking in the '“porch” guys and gals!

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February Song-gram

A song-gram is a song you write for someone as a gift. We’ll be working on these this month using prompts provided by students. The goal is to generate art by turning a written prompt into a musical idea. The twist is that the art is about and for someone else, you are sharing your musical ideas as a creative gift. The songs could turn out all sorts of ways but it’s a way to connect us in a language we could all get better at speaking, music. Sharing that is what it’s all about.

Winter Recital 2020 Collaboration

We premiered this live on YouTube a few weeks ago for our virtual recital. So proud of these 15 students, ages 5-19, who navigated and submitted multiple recordings of themselves to metronomes and backing tracks without knowing what the final product would sound like! This was a new collaboration aspect to our second virtual recital this year. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

August days

Been trying out some social distance jamming lately and lucking out with the August weather. It’s been fun scouting out quiet open spaces in the Anchorage area and hoping they remain quiet and the weather holds on the day of! A voice amplifier would be nice but this spot at Kincaid was quiet enough that I didn’t need one to make it work.

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Live After Five- Super Saturated Sugar Strings

Happy to share some new Super Saturated Sugar Strings tunes with you! Playing music with friends is quite emotional after going through musical withdrawals! I forgot how good it feels. Thankful for the Anchorage community for providing a way for us to share and listen to music right now. You can catch other local virtual concerts happening this summer on the Anchorage Downtown Partnership’s facebook page too.

Keeping busy in our homes

I hosted and performed in my first online student recital last month; we uploaded our performances to an unlisted YouTube playlist to view and share at our discretion for the next month or so. It was very cool to see how each video was made and how it contributed to the performance itself, some were outside with breathtaking views and others had cool visual effects. The hardest part about this for me was not being able to do group songs with students but I had to remind myself that coming together in this new way was a first and that in itself was growth to be proud of. Finding ways to grow right now is hard, I am finding it helpful to define goals and work towards them, even though they’re not what they used to be. My goal as a teacher and performer is to keep improving our playing, performing and expression of music, however that may be. As a musician and music lover, my lifestyle has been stifled by the absence of performing and attending shows where I used to connect with others through sharing the joys of music. Now we must find other ways to nurture the joys of music that are not so group dependent. We must be patient, be flexible with our goals and celebrate even the smallest ones, and most importantly stay connected to keep each other strong.

Music is not canceled

Oh the countless platforms for sharing audio and video and countless recordings sent back and fourth each week! Let’s just say I’m constantly learning here as we are forced to slow down and figure things out in new ways. I’m trying to provide useful resources but I know we can easily feel overwhelmed by all the options. I like to think of Cat Stevens (Yusuf) singing, “Take your time, think a lot, why think of everything you’ve got”. So here’s another video on one of the most fundamental skills in playing the violin; how to hold it correctly and comfortably. I hope you find it useful as you navigate your home learning, let me know if you have questions.

Silver linings I've discovered in giving and taking online music lessons

-recording yourself and listening back reveals how out of tune you actually are

-scheduling is wiiiide open and super flexible ⌚️

-learning the one thing that you've always wanted but were to scared/ scarred to master: tuning a violin 😱

-a human connection that's cheaper than Animal Crossing, for the first few lessons anyway 🐮

-you look like a cool dj with one earphone on and one off 😎

-no house cleaning or pants necessary

-learning to play accompaniment with a half second of delay, super pro

-seeing super cool kids bedrooms 💫

-being bombarded with cute videos of kids playing music 😍

-supporting your favorite musicians as many are offering lessons since their gigs have been canceled