Darker days can lead to darker thoughts. It’s usually this time of year that I start to see more of my students struggling with negative thoughts about their playing and progress and I wear the hat of the cheer leader and therapist a bit more often ...

A student’s first lessons with a new private music teacher are usually a mixture of excitement and possibility, nerves, and often a bit of overwhelm. Over the course of a few lessons, a perceptive teacher will identify certain areas of technique, posture, ...

Every day we are offered choices. This food or that food. This activity or that activity. Every thing we decide to fill our time with means that we are choosing not to fill that time with other things. How do we decide what interests to devote our ...

My partner and I have a friend who jokes about the fact that we never have anything but very specialized magazines lying around. Next to the piles of Strings Magazine and The Strad, my non-specialized reads are as specialized as Yoga Journal, VegeLife, ...

I went out to see Mike Beck and the Bohemian Saints play at Plaza Linda in Carmel Valley Village on Saturday and ended up sitting in with the band for the second set. The experience brought me back to the first gig I played with the Cardinale Brothers’ ...