This episode is part of the Building a Band Program series on the Rock School Proprietor podcast, hosted by John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com).
In this episode, John shares his insights on how to structure a successful band program, covering planning, goal setting, and anticipating future growth.
Included:
- Planning your band season
- Setting achievable goals for students
- Creating a rehearsal timeline and schedule
If you’re interested in starting a band program in your music teaching studio or looking for ideas to enhance or grow an existing program, this series is for you! In we will cover how a band program can create a strong community in your studio, increase profit margins, and lead to greater student retention.
Interested in the Building a Band Program webinar?
We’re planning a free live webinar to accompany this series where John will go deeper on these topics and answer your questions directly. If you’re interested, send an email to info@rockschoolproprietor.com with the subject line Webinar and we will be in touch with details.
Rock School Proprietor is a podcast for independent music school owners and lesson studio operators. New episodes drop Wednesdays at RockSchoolProprietor.com and on all podcast streaming platforms.
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Episode Transcript:
(Please note: This transcript was generated by robots. There may be errors. For the best experience, please listen to the podcast episode.)
John Kozicki (00:01.006)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor Podcast. My name is John Kozicki and welcome to our special series of Rock School Proprietor Podcast, Building a Band Program. And my goal with this series of episodes is I’m going to share all the things I’ve learned from running my music school, Michigan Rock School, a rock school over the course of just over a decade, plus my experience
at my previous music school, which was very similar. I’ve been running band programs for a long time in my music schools, and I want to share that info and give it to the listeners so that if you are thinking about setting up a band program in your studio, if you’ve recently started one and you want some tips, I’m going to share everything that I know. Maybe you’ve…
had a School of Rock or a Bach to Rock move in recently and you’re thinking, how am I going to compete with their programs? People seem to be asking for band programs, what should I do? I’m gonna share that info with you. This will be a multi-part series, but this one today, this one’s about how to structure your band program. So this is gonna be about setting things up and we’ll get into other things like how to choose.
band coaches and how to group the band members and all sorts of other things in future episodes. But this one, this is one’s how to structure your band program.
So think about this as kind of similar to how a team might set up a season. You’re gonna have a timeline or maybe a play production. They might plan for a show and that’s gonna start with auditions through the final production. Start with that big picture and then you’re gonna break it down into smaller steps. So for our purposes on this episode,
John Kozicki (02:06.424)
what I’m going to do is going to break this into three different segments on planning your instruction, your band program. Number one is going to be your timeline. Number two is going to be goal setting, setting up goals for, for your program. And then number three, we’re going to anticipate what happens when it’s finished. So let’s get into first the timeline. This is going to create the blueprint for your entire
entire season or entire session or production or whatever you call it. We call them sessions at my school and the session it goes from, you know, first rehearsal all the way to the concert. We’re going to plan what we do in that timeline, that timeframe. So number one, you want to plan how many weeks, how many weeks or how many months do you want this program?
to go from, again, from first rehearsal through concert. I do about three to four months per band session at my school. You can do longer, you can do shorter. I’ve done kind of experiments where we’ve done two month programs and little workshops and teaser groups. So it definitely can be done on a shorter or a longer timeframe.
But again, you wanna have that timeline so that then you can start plugging in tasks in what you’re going to do. Frequency of rehearsals. How often are these groups going to meet to rehearse their music in preparation for the concert? I’m a big proponent of weekly band rehearsals. Much like I’m sure most of us do weekly lessons, that weekly timeline seems to work best.
Um, you could do more. I definitely heard arguments for doing less. I’ve even done a, uh, a program at my school where it was even monthly rehearsals. Um, that was a good, a good strategy when I was first building things up. But what I learned from, from that experience is that people want that frequency to be predictable and sort of in line with everything else that.
John Kozicki (04:30.816)
that happens in their lives. So again, music lessons are weekly. We can do these rehearsals weekly. I haven’t explored or tried doing more frequent rehearsals. I made the comparison to sports teams and seasons and play productions definitely know that those schedules involve more than once per week when it comes to team practices or rehearsals. So I think you could explore that.
and you could make an argument for it, but whatever you decide, put that in your timeline. Again, this is going to create the blueprint that you’re gonna share with your students and your parents and your instructors. So whatever you decide, put it on your timeline. Then length of rehearsals. How long should each rehearsal be? Again, I’ll share at my studio. We do roughly 45 minute to 90 minute rehearsals.
much of that has to do with experience level of the students and attention span. Some of the franchises do much longer rehearsals where kids may be there for hours. There’s an argument to be made for that. That is not the structure that I like or use. I’m pretty happy with how we have things structured at my school where we do 45 minute rehearsals, 60 minute rehearsals.
90 minute rehearsals for some of those more experienced kids. Keep in mind, and we’ll get into this either in this episode or in future episodes, what you’re doing in those rehearsals is really rehearsing. It’s not, you’re not necessarily teaching the music to the kids in the groups. So that might help frame things a little bit differently. Set a concert date, book a venue,
set a schedule for your reservations or your ticket sales, plug that in. Again, you’re going to be providing this information in either a one sheet or an email or something to all of the parents in your studio or who are participating in this program, all of the students. They want to know when they get this information and their kid has signed up for your band program.
John Kozicki (06:57.889)
They wanna know these things. They wanna know when are rehearsals. So I can put it in my calendar. How long are the rehearsals? When is that concert date? Because I’m gonna put that on my calendar right now to make sure that we don’t schedule a vacation or that we don’t have a conflict with some other sport on that day and time. So get all of that stuff set up in the front end and that’s all part of your timeline. So that was number one, timeline. Number two,
We’re gonna talk about setting goals. Now, when I talk about setting goals, what I’m talking about really is for each one of those groups in your program, how many songs should that band perform in the concert? That’s gonna establish what you’re going to focus on in band rehearsals, how you’re going to prep them, what you wanna accomplish from that first rehearsal until that concert.
Obviously you’re wanna consider the ability level of each group and plan accordingly. I am a strong, strong proponent of quality over quantity when it comes to the number of songs that a group will perform in a concert. We want the students to feel confident and we want them to feel good about the songs that they’re playing.
And what we don’t want is for those nerves to kick in in the concert and the performance suffers because maybe they were trying to take on more than they could handle. Again, quality over quantity. I tend to focus on realistic goals based on what I think those groups are capable of. So if we’re talking about
I mean, we’ve even done groups where the kids are really young and inexperienced. We’ll take a three month session just to get that band playing one song for the concert, right? So they feel really good about that one song. And on the opposite end of that spectrum, we’ve had more experienced students play set lists of up to 10 songs in a concert. So again, that is 100 % based on
John Kozicki (09:19.275)
what their experience level is, what they are capable of learning in the span of that three to four month session, at least at my school. So set those realistic goals. Hand in hand with quality over quantity, I believe it’s better to add songs later than to cut songs and not hit a goal. meaning if I decide this band is going to…
work on four songs for the concert. I would much rather they hit those four songs and they have, you know, three weeks before the concert and everything sounding great and have time to add a song rather than overshoot it and say, all right, we’re going to try and get five songs, maybe six songs, and then not hit that goal. Again, you want to build confidence with the kids in this group.
Right, you want them to feel good about what they’re doing when they’re going into this performance. Then once you decide how many songs, set a timeline for that group. Just like we’re doing for this entire program, we set a timeline for the program, set a timeline for that group. If your group’s gonna do four songs for the concert, for instance.
and you have four months to prep them from first rehearsal to concert, then there you go. You’ve got on average one song per month that you’re going to be working on with these students. I find that that one song per month is a pretty good rule of thumb to start with with an average ability level group of kids. If you feel like
you’ve got a group of kids who are maybe more capable, well, yeah, add a couple songs, add one song. If you’ve got a group of kids who are very green and inexperienced, maybe cut back on that and give yourself some more time. But one song per month, at least in the format that I’m running, where these kids are doing weekly rehearsals at about an hour long rehearsal each week.
John Kozicki (11:41.172)
One song per month is a pretty good benchmark and a pretty good rule of thumb to gauge off of. Okay, so we talked about setting a timeline for your band program. We talked about kind of a smaller microcosm of that is what you’re going to do with these bands and setting goals for each individual band. The last thing I wanna talk about when you are structuring your band program is anticipate what
happens next. And when I say next, I mean what happens after the concert. Your students and parents are going to love this experience. They’re going to want to do it again. So even as you’re planning, even if you’ve never done a band program before, build into that plan and that structure what
how you want kids to be able to continue, how you want them to be able to do this band program again, what your next session or season or whatever you call it, what that’s going to look like. So it doesn’t have to be as roughed out or as structured as your first run, but just put a little note in there, assuming everything goes well.
you’re gonna do this again and what’s the rough timeline for that? And when you get to that point in your current session where you’re talking about the concert.
Put a little note in those communications, maybe before the final performance, maybe before the concert. If you want to do this again, here’s what’s gonna happen. Provide them information about how they can continue. Provide them information about when you’re going to start rehearsals again. Provide information about maybe…
John Kozicki (13:45.741)
staying with the current group of kids or maybe working at a different group, even better than putting that information out there, establish a way that you can get them to commit to that next band session because some of those students are going to love this experience and love the journey so much that even before the concert, they’re gonna say, I don’t know what happens after the concert, but I wanna do this again.
And then you’re probably going to have some other students who are like, I don’t know. I want to see how goes with the concert. Chances are pretty good that after the concert, they’re going to want to do it again. So have that in place already. And then you’re going to have other students who maybe didn’t participate and ultimately see how fun this experience is. And they’re going to want to get involved, right? So you’re anticipating what’s going to happen after this first run.
or after this concert. All right, so timeline is number one, set goals is number two, anticipate what happens. Next is number three in when you’re planning and structuring your band program. I hope this was helpful. I hope you enjoyed this first edition of how to, excuse me, building your band program, special series from Rock School Proprietor podcast.
We will see you again soon. Again, we’ve got topics on choosing instructors to lead band classes, how to group students and band members, how to choose songs, what a band class or rehearsal looks like, managing students in rehearsals, elements of a great concert, all of those things we’re gonna cover in Building a Band Program series on Rock School Proprietor Podcast, and we’ll see you next time.
