School of the Blues is built around concepts that maximize the learning process through the way in which we structure our personalized lesson plans all the way to how the rooms were built and set up. Detailed below is what you can expect as a student with us.

Personalized Lesson Plans
Each and every student has a way in which they learn best. Some people learn better in a more structured written format, and some people learn better in a more auditory (listen and copy) format. Lesson plans are structured around your current needs, your long term goals, and the way in which you learn best. Your instructor will keep a lesson log of what you've covered, what you're currently working on, and where you're going. This helps keep lesson plans and a student's instruction on track.

School of the Blues Instruction Approach
Both the instructors and students have a written guideline for success. Since blues and related styles are more improvisational, the way in which we approach instruction is very different than standard "classical" lesson formats. We have two approaches: how we structure your lesson plan for success and how you structure your practice time for success.

Here's the School of the Blues instruction approach (using blues as the model).
1. We teach you the structure of blues and the basic theory to understand it.
2. We teach you the phrasing that's important to successful improvisation and song writing.
3. We speak of a new technique (or concept) and make sure you understand the mechanics of how it works.
4. We make sure you can physically do it (or help you on your way to doing it).
5. We make sure you understand its context and how it's applied.
6. We give you exercises on how to develop it.
7. We give you written songs or verses that you can work on to play this in context with music.
8. We help rehearse you to play the song well with the band (background music or jam session).
9. Periodically we look back at your lesson log and use a lesson to jam with you to see how well you're placing your learned material into context.
10. Every four months there's a student jam session at which we help you to play with other students. Your instructor will be present at the jam sessions.
11. The end of the year we help you to write an original instrumental or vocal song with a head and body that you will perform with a band at our end of the year concert.

What School of the Blues specializes in is the "whole" musical experience. Heavy emphasis is on placing what you learn into "context."

Recording Lessons
We all feel (the instruction staff) that recording each and every lesson is a great way to maximize your retension of lesson material. Each studio is equipped with a high quality CD recorder. This allows:
1. You listen back to any part of the lesson that might be in question.
2. You play along with instructor examples.
3. You to get more out of each and every lesson because the instructor doesn't need to write down or repeat many times a specific example.

Jam Sessions
Every four months there's a student/teacher jam session. This is where you place what you've been learning into context. This is also where you can meet other students of your instrument to swap ideas and network with players of other instruments to jam, start duos or bands!

Year-end Concerts
At the end of the year we help you to write an original instrumental or vocal song with a head and body that you will perform with a band at our end of the year concert. This is your chance to get real-world experience working with a band and to show off your hard work to family and friends.

As you can see, much time has been spent in designing a thorough, time-proven instruction approach that's modified to meet the needs of each and every student. If you like our approach, give us a call at 408-224-2936 to get started!