How did you spend your Christmas? We mostly spent ours ripping down walls and false ceilings and preparing our new premises for the Keighley music store on Russell Street. We have bought the Old Labour Exchange in Keighley because, as anyone who has visited our Keighley shop in the past year will know, we have vastly out grown the current premises and we needed more room for all our ideas.
What can you expect? Well, we will have a huge show room four times bigger than what we currently have, new bigger lesson rooms for our music tuition and on the same premises is the new Exchange Arts Centre, a venue which will host music and arts events not just by ourselves but for local and national bands, theatre groups, workshops and much more.
We’re very excited about what we have in store for you and can’t wait to show all our pupils, customers and teachers the new building which should be completed at the end of March. In the mean time here are a few photos of ongoing works which may give you a rough idea of what is coming and how much work we have left to do!
The New Building
Walls to be taken down
But Spade Boy helped
Beware of Spade Boy
Gordon Freeman also helped (geek reference alert)
Walls down in showroom, time to take down that horrible false ceiling
Marie snipping bits of ceiling down
Taking down a false ceiling is hard
And messy
Part of the boiler system, might need an update
Ceiling looking a much nicer shape now
Bones of acoustic room built
And our mini stage in the shop
Also underway teaching rooms upstairs
And the stage in the venue
We’re keeping this brickwork we found when pulling down the false ceiling
Cast iron radiators being removed, they had all burst in last years big freeze
We found these ceiling skylights under the false ceiling too
The wood for the acoustic walls has arrived! Orginally cut for a 1958 Bailey Bridge
We found an article recently about building a new copy of a Stradivarius violin using a CAT scanner and replicating the densities on 3D CAD software and then replicating the build into a brand new violin.
While this is an amazing use of technology and impressive in concept, it threw up a few questions to us in the wider area of musical instrument manufacturing. While throughout the years we have certainly seen high points (and low points) in terms of classic design and workmanship, this direction gives the impression that the best instruments have already been made.
We can’t get over the fact that this outlook is pessimistic at best and anti-innovative at worst. Why do we have to keep going back and trying to replicate the past when it comes to instruments? Why not itterate and innovate so that people in 100 years will be looking back at us and saying, “Wow, they made amazing progress in the early 2000s when it came to amazing instruments.”
Some companies are better at this than others. Yamaha guitars for example constantly itterate and improve their designs. Listening to people who give them feedback and keeping an eye on returns and where the weak points in their products are and fixing them in the next version. They should be applauded for this, Yamaha are one of the few companies that do improve dramatically model on model. Tanglewood Guitars are another company that we have found listen to us and while the process of improving a musical instrument product is not a quick one it is going in the correct direction.
While it is a slow process in physical goods, if you look towards the software technology sector where software is updated sometimes daily, you can see how companies compete at such a rate that consumers are getting an often amazing and constantly improving product.
The Yamaha APX and CPX electro-acoustic guitars have long been loved by gigging musicians for their no nonsense build quilaity and clarity when plugged into an amplifier or PA. In the APX and CPX guitars are designed from the ground up to be used plugged in with special attention given to the pickups.
Always innovating and improving, Yamaha fit a System 54 pickup on the 700 series which used a transducer circle underneath the bridge part of the guitar instead of a normal piezo under saddle pickup. The result is a clear and realistic plugged in tone you only hear from the Yamaha APX and CPX range.
On 4th September over 30 children ranging from 6 year olds to 18 year olds got their first taste of performing at a Rock Concert. Musicians Centre in Keighley Railway Station ran Rock Band Camps and Glee Clubs throughout the summer holidays to give students an opportunity to form bands and to perform to a packed showcase concert at Keighley’s New Variety Club.
The six newly formed bands each choose a classic rock tune they wanted to perform such as ‘Highway To Hell’, ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’ after only five hours of intensive training the children learnt essential skills needed to be in a band such as working as a team, performance, song structure and most importantly how to keep it together when things go wrong.
The two Glee Clubs also performed current songs such as ‘One Big Family’ and ‘California King Bed’ before coming together to perform a showstopping rendition of ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ to which Town Mayor, Councillor Michael Westerman was moved to instantaneously offer a chance to perform in front of many other town mayors at an event he is hosting.
Seeing the children come from starting with their head low, a bit unsure, apprehensive and nervous about meeting new people to rocking out on stage, singing and performing was great to see.
Seeing them leave with new friends and in some cases newly formed bands really makes all the hard work worthwhile. I don’t think anybody left the concert in any doubt that there will be some new rockstars coming out of Keighley!
The singing group idea has been turned into a regular weekly group starting at the end of September. Find out details of how to try it for free in our music lessons section. Plans are afoot for another Rockband Camp too in the near future. In the mean time we wish all our band members and performers well and hope they all keep playing.
We decided last minute to haul ourselves down to London’s Olympia Conference Centre for the London Acoustic Guitar Show at the weekend. Excited to try new products and meet some old friends from the suppliers we went armed with a camera and sneakily filmed some new things.
This is the first year of the London Acoustic Guitar Show and we have to say it was definitely a big success. All the big hitters of the acoustic world were there, Tanglewood, Freshman, Yamaha, Martin & Co. as well as a few smaller distributors with some outstanding new products. We caught up with Michael Sanden along the way and had a great chat comparing his designed Tanglewood MasterDesign guitars compared to his own Sanden Acoustic guitars.
We made an intro video with a quick overview of what we saw, click on the links within the video for a more indepth video of each thing we saw.
Here’s the rest of the videos if you want to get straight stuck into each individual one.
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