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Elton Joel RW2 2'25
With apologies to them both. A rock piano solo without lyrics.
Recording (mp3, 1.9MB)
Elegy RW2 2'25
Many, many parts to weave and balance - needs ensemble skills, even though it's for solo piano.
Recording (mp3, 1.6MB)
Recording (mp3, 1.2MB)
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Snowflakes RW2 2'25Recording (mp3, 0.9MB)
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Running a competition back to magazine homepage
Introduction | Hyping the lead-up | Limiting the time | Creating prize categories
Choosing great rewards | Certificates | The "Doubler" factor | Creating leaderboards | Team based competitions | Strategic timing | Interstudio competitions
Creating a Hall of Fame | Turning it into a fundraiser
Turning it into a fundraiser
With all this practice going on, there's a terrific opportunity for some fund raising for your favorite worthy cause—which in turn provides an additional incentive for even more practice.
The idea is that your students would collect sponsors, who would donate a certain amount for each hour of practice completed.
Create a special prize
In addition to all your other awards, you could create a special award for the Most Money Raised—it might not necessarily be your hardest practicing student.
Fundraising doesn't have to be motivated by a cynical desire for studio-promotion, but if the hard work of you and your students means that there's a check of $5000 being handed to a local charity, then you should at least consider contacting the media.
As the larger-than-life check is handed over, the charity wins not only because of the money itself, but because of the additional media exposure. And your studio is noticed by thousands of potential students as they see the photo while eating their breakfast.
And if the story happens to mention the individual efforts of your leading fundraiser-student, that becomes a powerful incentive for next year's students to better their efforts (everyone loves to see their name in the paper).
Creating pre-competition media interestIf your fundraising is target based ("we're going to raise $6,000 for Breast Cancer research), then you may well get local media interested as the competition starts.
The best method is to appear side-by-side for the radio spot with someone from the organization that will be benfiting from your work. You can talk about the practice competition, the organization can ttalk about the good work they do, and their need for support—and the radio station ends up with a 6 minute spot that's a local good news story, with the promise to follow up once the competition is over.
It's a win for everyone, and a studio promotion opportunity that would have cost you thousands of dollars in conventional advertising (and lacked the same impact!)
Note...It's not really the focus of this article, but if you're interested learning more about how to promote your studio, you should check out this 240 page guide.