About

Welcome to my wordpress account where hopefully I have written something that you either find useful or enlightening. The purpose of this is to share some of my professional and recreational experiences in regards to music (of which I’ve been and clarinet and saxophone teacher since 2001).

So why write at all? Well, by day I’m actually a software programmer by trade (music is a part time thing for me), and after reading a programming book by Joel Spolsky which is essentially a compilation of his professional (mis)adventures as a professional software developer, it seemed like a great idea to share my equivalent experiences as a music teacher.

In one of the chapters, Joel makes mention on the benefits of practising writing. What better way to do that than to make a blog.

Also, there’s a good chance I won’t be teaching forever so it seems like good idea to get my experience in writing before that day comes when I stop. There’s a lot of commitment required in teaching (at least the way I do), because to disappear overseas for 6 weeks really disrupts learning for the students.

The great thing about teaching clarinet is that, unlike programming, I feel like I have all the answers. It’s great for the ego to know exactly what a student’s shortcomings are and have the skill and knowledge to be able to show them how to fix those shortcomings.

If you’ve spotted the lone programming article (it’s a C++, Lua article), that’s because I was initially crazy enough to think that having music and programming articles in the one wordpress account was a good idea. Seriously, it’s not. If you want to check out my limited programming adventures, head over codetactics where I have a (now quite old) gaming project called Mobile Assault (which you can download from iTunes).

One could always do with a reason to exercise their writing skills. Agreed?