Music Lessons for the Kids

Introducing… Amped Up Music Academy

We’re lucky enough to be a band of full-time musicians, so alongside performing in the band we also teach music throughout the week.

People are always asking us what we do when we’re not performing… Well, we spend a lot of time at Amped Up Music Academy in Doncaster. We teach guitar and drums there ourselves, but they provide lessons on all sorts of band based instruments.

What’s great about Amped Up is they provide performance based lessons, so we get to teach kids not only how to play their instruments, but how to perform, how to play live and how to write music. It’s kind of like a modern equivalent of the lessons we took when we were little lads ourselves!

Teaching kids how to play in a band

One of the courses we’re involved with, called Band Academy, is a 10-week program where we teach kids how to play together as a band. They learn the ropes by rehearsing songs together and they finish the course by performing a live gig. It’s a pretty cool course for young musicians, and we get to teach something we really enjoy ourselves too!

The process of learning how to write a song

One of the other group courses is a song writing program. We get to guide a class through a series of song writing lessons where kids get the chance to be creative and write their own music. At the end of the course we go back to doing our normal job and perform live with the kids, who sing the songs they’ve written – always a lot of fun!

Of course, there are normal one to one lessons too, we just prefer the group courses where there’s a lot of group interaction. That’s the kind of stuff that brings kids out of their shell and gives them something to work towards.

Teaching music in a modern way

All the lessons are based around live band instruments – guitar, bass, drums, piano (or keyboards) and singing, so for anyone who wanted to perform in a band like ours, it would be a great place to start.

The teachers we work alongside are highly qualified musicians, as you’d imagine, and the lessons are designed to be fun and creative. Amped Up’s whole idea is to bring music tuition in the modern era and get away from the boring, forced music lessons that a lot of children take in schools.

It suits us down to the bone. We love to teach how to play songs and how to play in a band – it’s literally our job! And hopefully we can inspire kids to get together and play music. Who knows, they might be the next Warning Tones in a few years!