The Summerglen Files

Sometimes when I hear other musicians going on about how many students they have, and how late they have to teach, etc., it’s easy to second-guess myself and start to worry if something’s wrong with my more relaxed teaching schedule. “Why don’t I have 50 students every week?” I ask, and the answer comes clearly, [...]

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Yesterday evening, one of the ensembles I perform with lost a gig–because the gig was booked by a scammer! A couple months back, another group lost a show because they relied on a verbal agreement (and no deposit) to book the gig. Both the scammer and the verbal agreement person backed out at the last [...]

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The speech for the Wake County Women Business Owners Network went very well! My presentation was designed to teach business owners the skills of performers, to help them promote their businesses more easily. In the presentation, I offered 5 tips to help build the inner confidence needed to perform well and feel comfortable in front [...]

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I’ll type this post quickly, because I need to take my own advice and chill out for the night. I have always been blessed with good health, except for my rotten sinuses. They’ve been hurting all day, so it’s time to have a Benadryl and say good night. So with that, here’s the final post [...]

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This is the third post in this week’s series celebrating the one year anniversary of Summerglen Music. Today’s topic: getting the word out in a way that educates people and gives back to the community. I had absolutely no marketing experience when I started Summerglen, but I knew I needed to get the word out. [...]

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This is the second post in this week’s series celebrating the one year anniversary of Summerglen Music. Today I’ll talk about my wonderful clients, and how I found them easily. Before I started Summerglen, I thought that the best way to find music students, brides who wanted cool ceremony music, and people to host Summerglen [...]

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This is the first post in this week’s series celebrating the one year anniversary of Summerglen Music, Raleigh’s home for beautiful performances and empowering musical learning experiences. In the series, I’ll share things that helped me make the leap from working for someone else to living my dream of being a full-time trombonist. Today, books! [...]

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In yesterday’s post, I described my somewhat clumsy journey into marketing as a musician. However awkward the journey, though, I’ve found several approaches to promoting my musical services that WORK! Here are my top five, in no particular order: 1. Go out and play – Generally, when people read a description of a musical group [...]

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The blog has been a bit of a ghost town lately, because I’ve been out in the heat of the North Carolina summer, learning. When you get a music degree, or even when you get -two- music degrees, there’s actually not much class time devoted to daily life as a musician. In my studies, there [...]

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As I said in the last post, since I’ve lived here I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more musicians out playing in public. So this summer, instead of wondering, I’ve decided to become one of those musicians! For the past couple of days, Andrew and I have gone around town scouting for places to play, [...]

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