Music Blogspot: Advice for Music College Students

These days, there are a number of opportunities for careers in the Music Industry. While there are many choices for residential professional training, have you considered studying at a distance? It can have many advantages such as affordability, but the choices are fewer. One such school you may wish to consider is the US School of Commercial Music (www.usschoolofmusic.com), a college offering complete programs for Music Industry careers and serious avocations.

The purpose of this article is to suggest an approach whereby you can evaluate online schools, particularly those offering music courses. There is an obvious financial advantage to studying at home, but can you really get a thorough education that way?

The following principles may be used to compare whether any distance school has a relevant approach. There are a number of factors. An online college should have:

Complete wide-ranging programs that! are fun, thorough and exciting! Special relevant courses unavailable elsewhere. Better, more up-to-date materials, technologies and assignments. Nearly-instant feedback on each assignment via the internet. An incomparably thorough hands-on learning experience.

While these principles apply to all schools, this article applies specifically to online music colleges. Let's take each of these topics in turn in an analysis of music education:

To determine whether a school is good for you, perhaps the first question to ask is *not* about accreditation, which is virtually meaningless in the Music Industry, and which can be achieved by easy affiliation without intrinsic merit, but whether a school is really a college or simply pretends to be one. That is, does the school have complete soup-to-nuts integrated programs or is it a hollow shell of unrelated or sub-college courses? While a single course or two can be fun, is it really college-level trai! ning? If it's not, is it really a good investment of time and ! money? T his article lists some of the advantages of a true college such as USSCM.

Perhaps the second question one might have is whether the program offered is relevant to working in the part of today's Music Industry to which you are attracted. For example, some colleges offer only Music Therapy degrees, which is great if that's what you want. Beyond that, does the school offer some really unique courses as part of its curriculum? For example USSCM offers unique certificate courses as electives in its programs. See http://www.usschoolofmusic.com/catalog/certificate_programs.html?universals.

Most colleges, by their nature, are not designed to upgrade their courses and materials frequently. This creates a hysteresis, a 'lateness' in the relevancy of the courses that can actually be measured. Schools sometimes refer to this as a "legacy," but it often turns schools into 'conservato! ries' which preserve the methods of the past. To counteract this tendency, USSCM updates its materials twice yearly in coordination with the research provided by NAMM, the National Association of Music Merchants. Perhaps no other college can make that claim.

A distance school should use technology for the things that it does best, not just for convenience or economies of scale that boost the bottom line by allowing fewer teachers to handle greater numbers of students. There is an exciting, better way that USSCM staff has developed to teach and train the skills and knowledge needed by a professional musician or serious musical hobbyist. In order to take advantage of the power of technology without it's distraction, USSCM has internally developed proprietary software which allows its teachers to communicate asynchronously but in near-real time, to make the learning feedback loop as small as possible. Schools which use technology often distract the students with its co! mplexity or attractiveness, only to result in a slower learnin! g cycle.

Finally, perhaps one of the most distracting issues facing music colleges is that students cannot advance rapidly because they only get to perform with their peers, who are invariably at their own level or inferior to it. USSCM's approach is Faculty-Minus-OneT; all students work exclusively with highly-focused recordings by recognized professionals, musicians who make their livings performing music. Even many students at bricks and mortar colleges seldom get this opportunity, because the competition for the time of the best teachers is extreme.

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The criteria above may be used to evaluate many sorts of distance courses. Use it to determine what is best for you. When it comes to music training, do your homework! USSCM may be better than many of the other choices you may have.

USSCM staff enjoys helping musicians progress! rapidly to their full potentials and feel this is particularly relevant in today's troubled world, because musicians are universal ambassadors for humanity. USSCM's programs are far more affordable than those of other schools, on or off the internet. Actually, no other college offers full commercial music programs online. If you, or someone you know, may benefit from a college-level program in contemporary music, please come see at www.usschoolofmusic.com, where you can also build programs, calculate tuition and sign in to receive the USSCM newsletter.

After that, please write to me and I will be happy to personally answer your remaining questions, hopefully as a USSCM applicant.

Thank you very much for your kind attention and best wishes for your future endeavors.

Professor John Amaral