Episode 3: Creativity in Musical Approach with Charlene Adzima

Episode Overview

Hannah sits down for a chat with fellow fiddle teacher, Charlene Adzima, who shares her journey into Irish music, her experience with Suzuki training, and her approach to teaching. The conversation explores the intersection of classical and folk music, the importance of creativity, compassion, and consistency in teaching, and the concept of finding one's 'lilt' in music.

Check out Charlene's website and keep up to date with her teaching schedule here!

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Episode Transcript

Intro

My very first guest on the Find Your Lilt podcast is Charlene Adzima. Described by one of her students as “the best teacher I've ever had,” fiddler Charlene Adzima is an energetic powerhouse both on stage and in the classroom. Concurrent with her Suzuki training as a child in Columbus, Ohio, Charlene fell in love with Irish music and ravenously sought out opportunities to study at workshops and camps with all Ireland fiddle champions Liz Carroll, Seamus Connolly, and Oisin Mac Diarmada.

Collecting the title of Senior Fiddle Champion at the 2005 Midwest Fleadh Cheoil Irish Music Competition, Charlene has been warmly accepted into the Irish music community and is known for her danceable, pulsing rhythm, and newly composed tunes. Charlene performs regularly with guitarist Rick Nelson, West Wind, and the Lilies of the Midwest. A former Irish step dancer, she is also in demand as a musician for Irish step dance competitions.

As a teacher, Charlene maintains a full studio in the Madison, Wisconsin area and has successfully applied Suzuki pedagogy to the teaching of authentic traditional folk styles. She is certified with the Suzuki Association of the Americas to teach violin books one, two, and three. Charlene has a teacher's heart and loves to creatively find ways to teach anything from basic violin/viola fundamentals to theory and composition to soulful musicality.

I absolutely love this bio of Charlene's. I love her website and I told her this in the interview. It's just very cleanly put together and it's just so accurate from what I know about her. So I'm really excited for you to listen to our conversation! We talked everything about our fellow Suzuki backgrounds and applying different approaches to teaching and learning and how we can become better teachers when we switch up our approaches. So I will not make you wait any longer. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Charlene.

Conversation

Hannah: Well, Charlene Adzima, welcome to the Find Your Little Podcast. You are officially the very first guest on, so very much looking forward to chatting with you!

Charlene: Man, so am I. Well, I mean chatting with you, but I'm honored. Thank you, Hannah. This is very exciting. Hopefully I can answer questions.

Hannah: You said you're fresh off of teaching tonight, so you got your teaching brain on! Well, just to start us off, when and how did Irish music come into your life?

Charlene: Well, it's a funny little story. How far back should we go? I started playing violin in 1992 with the Suzuki violin school over at Capitol University in Columbus, Ohio, Bexley, Ohio. And I had been dying to play violin ever since when I was about four, my grandma passed away. And I didn't know her that well, but that was my dad's mom, and all of a sudden there was a violin in the house.

And I said, this looks like fun, I wanna play this. And I picked Twinkle out on it and I begged Santa every year for five years to get me a violin. But mom really wanted me to do Suzuki and she didn't feel like they could afford it quite yet until I was about nine and a half. And so I was a very old Twinkler at that point.

And so I got to start doing that in ‘92 and then my mom found out the neighbor girl Anne Marie was doing Irish dance and we went to our local parish and we watched them do it and this other adult comes next sits next to my mom and says you know they've got an adult class and my mom is like well I'm Irish she's Southside Chicago Irish and I need aerobics and social time. So mom started doing that and she brought her tapes home and in Suzuki land we listened to our music all the time and we'd put it on in the car and so mom would put their dance tapes on in the car and I thought that was pretty good. And so I started picking up the tunes on there and then I started dancing and it kind of snowballed from there really where you start finding about the session.

My dance teacher would have me play for the beginner class before me and so many other things have happened since then. But that's the gist right there.

Hannah: So when you were doing dance and also Suzuki at the same time, were you kind of learning some of the tunes that you were also dancing to? Like just naturally did that come up or…?

Charlene: Yeah! I learned the ones that sounded awesome to me. So I'd be doing my Suzuki tunes and then my violin teacher who's amazing, Susan Somerville. She's incredibly creative and even though she didn't know anything about Irish music, she was very supportive of me and she'd have me play my, you know, minuet, whatever. And then at the end, she'd say, okay, now go play your fiddle tune.

And so that's what I would end up doing. I'd be like, yeah, this is what I'm working on right now. I've got Maudabawn Chapel from Eileen Ivers, cause she played it nice and slow. You know, so there you go.

Hannah: You came to Maudabawn Chapel at a much younger age than I did.

Charlene: Yeah. And I, and so many other versions of it down the road, but that's, that's my first one.

Hannah: I recently heard a recording of it being played up in B flat. Which does not work super well on the fiddle. I tried transposing it over and you definitely have to shift up to third position. But it is kind of fun to just sit down and workshop it and try to figure it out.

Charlene: Yeah, I can see that. It's a good tune.

Hannah: Well, I love hearing your approach because I'm also a Suzuki child. So my mom told me to pick an instrument at age five. And I think I must have been listening to a lot of those classical CDs of like Mozart's magical voyage and the Vivaldi, like the stolen Stradivarius that the kid had to go and rescue. And so of course you're hearing all like the Four Seasons clips in the background as they tell the story. And I think that I really, you know, like that one is... (lilts a few bars)

Charlene: Vivaldi A minor! Yep!

Hannah: That definitely was like, I want to play that. So... yeah.

Charlene: The big kids play that.

Hannah: I think that was my, maybe my first violin piece that I was ever really drawn to as a child. So, and then kind of similar thing. Well, I didn't have the dance background at all, but my teacher realized I was getting a little bored or discouraged for classical music and so she's like, well, how about you try fiddle tunes? So she brings out like old time and Scottish and Irish and the whole works and that did the trick. So thank goodness for those encouraging teachers that aren't like you just can only do the Suzuki method. Like you can do a whole lot of other things.

Charlene: I would argue that I have a lot to say about that actually. I would argue that Suzuki figured out what a lot of folk music people had already kind of figured out. At least one branch of what he did was the whole immersion, right? You can learn classical music the same way we learned folk music is basically what he came up with. You know, at least that's part of it, you know, outside of so many other branches, but like the whole like, we're going to learn how to speak this language before we delve into the nitty -gritty of it. And I'm like, yeah, that's basically what folk music is. You know?

Hannah: Yeah! I forget which part of book one, but like, I was not allowed to read the dots until probably like the Etude or the Minuets in the first book.

Charlene: So the whole idea of the line of the reading, right? Yeah, yeah, you would you know, I mean you would listen but you'd also have like I don't know if you have those sheets where you had a 1 2 3 e 1 2 3 and like navigating between the lines It's like yeah, almost like a cab system maybe

Hannah: Yeah, it's almost like Kevin Crawford and Colin Farrell shorthand but for Suzuki

Charlene: I'll have to see that. I'm not familiar with that, but that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, we just did it by ear. We did have a few like, you know, here's your A and A1, A2 and all that stuff, but it was largely by ear. And I, you know, thinking back to it now, it's sort of like training us to, to make sense of patterns, repeating and otherwise in our head, which actually trains you really well for Irish music.

Yeah. Cause you know, yeah, just find that pattern and, whatever, whatever else is going on here. So Suzuki and, and, and a lot of really great folk players that we know are also Suzuki trained. So again, it kind of goes to show that there's a good foundation there that can, you can branch off into lots of different ideas.

Hannah: Yeah. I'd be curious like if someone was trained in like the Galamian method or like if there was like I know there was these like Essential Elements brand of books for learning and I'm curious what someone learning from those methods how they would approach Irish music if it would be the same or if it would be totally totally different than if you had the Suzuki background.

Charlene: Well, I am also of the opinion that people tend to favor — this is where you get a little hairy with Suzuki is like the whole idea is that talent education, right? We educate the talent. But of course we have, we'll just call them natural tendencies, like whatever talents you've discovered on your own that you have nourished. So somebody like me who grew up singing favors learning by ear, you know, and some people might have grown up a different way and might favor reading off the page.

And so I've always felt like my students, whoever comes to me, some people will be like, no, I don't want to read. And I go, well, you're gonna, and you're going to learn by ear. You're going to do both. And somebody says, I couldn't possibly learn by ear. Like, yes, you can. Did anybody sit you down with the sheet music for happy birthday? Or did you, you know, just magically pick it up? There you go. So it is possible, but it is two different like brain, I don't know, two different brains. There's that. Just throw it there.

Hannah: There's the VARK. Yeah, the VARK learning method, it's like visual, audio, reflective and kinetic. And I definitely am like the audio kinetic side where yes, listening to it, maybe it's because my parents met in the church choir way back in the day. So I've just like naturally going to be more of an audio person. But yeah, audio and then kinetic of actually like you know, putting my hands on the instrument and trying it out, like getting that pattern recognition like you were saying, like that's, those are definitely my my stronger traits. But I do get students that they, it clicks for them when they read instead, or if they can like draw out a visual map of where the tune's going, that helps it stick more. So.I think, I mean, I think you could learn, I mean, because like we can both read sheet music and we can both listen to music and learn a tune by ear. So like you can do both skills, but one is going to maybe come more naturally than the other.

Charlene: Yeah. I actually learned how to read bass, you know, when I'm, when you're trying to learn a tune and you don't have a way to slow it down, you know, as, as we, we used to do and many of us still do, it's you get kind of discouraged and you go like I've got a couple of notes but what are they doing there and so in the late 90s I said the magic of the internet and found all the tune books and you know printed stuff out and it's hilarious but that's how that's one of the reasons I learned to read because I just wanted the same like I'm not getting this so little help yeah.

And also as a result, the way I read is not, I guess you could say, I can read between the notes. When I read, I don't have to play exactly what I see.

Hannah: Because you have it in your head, you can like, you sight reading would not be someone who's never heard a jig, or a reel or hornpipe, like they would never, it would just sound different.

Charlene: Yeah, it's like me reading Swedish music. I would be like, where are your emphases? I have no idea.

Hannah: I think it's the it's the String Sisters album. So they have this whole mix because it's Liz Knowles, Liz Carroll and then Annbjørg (Lien) and Emma (Härdelin) over in Norway and Sweden. And they're and I read their tunes and I'm like, I have to listen to the recording if I want to get the feel for it.

Charlene: That Tiger in the Valley one, I think. Yes. I was listening to the Lizzes podcast and I think both of those Liz's, Liz Carroll and Liz Knowles were like, whoa, we're just going to let you guys play this. I think they did learn it eventually though.

Hannah: I think they did. Yeah. I think I saw them play it in Dublin, Ohio this year.

Charlene: I would agree with that, having been there as well. Yes. Excellent.

Hannah: Well, I wanted to make sure to touch on this because I was creeping on your website as I was getting ready for this interview. And also, it just... The tech person in me is like, it's just so easy to navigate. It's so clean. It's beautiful. So I really, really loved going through your website. And I mean, I was like, I had sent you the questions actually before I went there, I was like, wait, I'm answering some of my own questions by reading. But I, of course, want to hear your take on it as well. So something that kind of stood out to me was that you talk about these three traits that you instill in all of your students. So it was creativity, compassion, and the middle one is consistency. So the three C's.

Charlene: Yeah, it's been a while since I've used that in the forefront of my mind anyway. I threw it up there because so a lot of that came out of the pandemic when I basically we went from 60 to zero teaching and parenting and doing all that stuff in 2020 I had a I don't know let's see we'll say March of 2020 I had a nine -month -old and a four -year -old.

And, you know, and then all of a sudden I'm at home all the time, trying to figure out the family stuff and, teaching online and just doing tech support while I'm trying to teach, which was hilarious. But I got good at it, even though it was extraordinarily stressful. But I had a lot of introspection time to go like, well, okay, what am I doing? I've got to define myself here. And I've got to keep kids going because we've all got to, I think you need to hold on to some humanity within this crisis. And so my goal during the pandemic was just to keep kids playing. Even if it wasn't progressing as quickly as I would like under normal circumstances, I'm just like, you know what? We've got to like reach the brain, I think.

And so I went with the whole creativity, compassion, and then the third one that I can't remember again either. Consistency. Consistency. See, aren't we consistent?

Hannah: We're very consistent in consistently forgetting the consistency!

Charlene: Yay! But I thought that they worked really well together with how we learn music, how we might approach music, and of course, consistency being the idea of practice, whether it be habitual practice every day or practicing a spot over and over again. That's what you're looking for. And of course, creativity being where you're, this isn't working. Well, now you gotta come up with a new plan. You gotta solve problems.

That to me is a lot of creativity. And then of course, compassion when stuff does not work, as a lot of stuff was not working during the pandemic. So many things were not working and it would have been very easy to throw up your hands and just go, Although, you know, I probably did that more than once.

That's also part of the Suzuki idea is that we are compassionate with our students. We put the onus on the teacher, pretty squarely on the teacher. We'll say 90 % on the teacher and we'll say 10 % on the student, just to give you a number. That if the student is not understanding something, it is on the teacher to make it clear and that is a tall order.

That's why it is hard to be a Suzuki teacher and why a lot of people might dismiss it because you are doing something that is a little bit deeper than just here are some notes I'm going to teach you how to play the violin and you're saying no I'm teaching the person in front of me and their personality is very different than the last kid and you can't teach it the same way.

So as a kid myself, as an adult, I find myself to be somewhat unique that way too. So I have a lot of empathy for other highly sensitive people like myself. If I got upset, I would... I can't remember what that's called. It's usually shaped like a bullseye, but the whole idea of the comfort zone and then the learning zone and then that panic zone thing. I can't remember what that's called. But I would find myself in that panic zone, and everyone's got a different stress reaction there. For instance, my daughter gets angry and yells or kicks things or whatever.

And I would just break down and cry. And then you feel even worse because the teacher doesn't know what to do when you're crying. And you're like, now I feel bad, because now you feel bad, but I feel bad because I feel, ugh, it's awful. It's absolutely awful. And it got to the point in college where I would just tell my teacher, say, when I get frustrated, I will cry. It is not your fault. Leave me alone for a second. I'll be right back. You know?

And it took me that long to figure it out. Like, okay, there you go. but I have, I have a lot of empathy and I feel like, you know, I don't want to leave people behind just because they have a physical reaction to something. Like I want to, I want to look at that reaction and go, how can, how can we use this to your advantage? How can we cope with this? Because you can still learn this music. We just might have to find another way around it rather than my first way.

Hannah: If you have any examples off the top of your head, like, I don't know, like if you're trying to teach a particular bowing pattern or something like, and it just, they weren't getting it, how would you go about?

Charlene: I've done that all... Re -shaping the room. So many different ways. I mean, you could write it out on notes, but I've discovered sometimes that's not very helpful because then they're like glued to the page, right? Unless you've got a memorable pattern. Another way to do it is then maybe I'll do a little shorthand where I'll say, okay, you've got three notes that are separate. Then you've got three notes that are under a bow. So you count.

You know, and that's another, and I don't know if that's another way that people do it in the community because I've never been taught bowing in Irish music. I've seen the bowing books, but you know, that's just not a thing. Or if it is a thing, I haven't found it yet. And maybe that's part of my journey here. Let's see, or you know, we can move it in the air. We can sing it and we can move it in the air.

I can move the bow for them. I can ask them questions like which direction are we going to start, you know, to refocus the brain. Because we can't notice everything all at once. It doesn't work that way, right? We've got to...

We've got to hone that focus. I like what Liz Knowles says, “squint your ears.” Yeah. I think that's pretty cute and very accurate because it makes you feel a little bit better about yourself as a person who's had ears their whole life and listens. Like, I listen to the same thing you listen to. Why didn't I notice the same thing you didn't notice? Because we have to decide what to focus on, hence squint your ears. So yeah, I could, I could think of lots of different ways. Maybe we would tell a story. I like stories.

You know some sort of visual, right? You know, we're gonna do one, two, three, our bow is backwards from where it was before, now we've gotta go one, two, three, we're going to go over the smooth mountain, you know? I don't know. Anything to surprise the student because I think John Williams said this best, I think he might have gotten it from someone else, he says you always want to surprise your audience, because then you're more memorable.

And that is indeed what our brains like to do. I don't know if you've noticed, I'm very interested in brains. Very interested in this. So, I don't know if that helps. yeah. That's a reasonable place to be, but I love that stuff. Yeah. I feel like we could have a whole like separate podcast of different stories you can tell the bow tunes different ways.

Yeah. Quick. Come up with five different ways to teach this. It's a really good exercise. It is. there was an exercise I did in Suzuki teacher training that you might also really enjoy. where, my teacher trainer, one of my teacher trainers is Martha Shackford. And she came in holding this, like this pile of junk. It was literally junk that she picked up like outside wherever.

And it was like pieces of mulch and flowers and trash, you know, just random items. And she said, it was a little, you know, a little loosey goosey here, but she says, all right, pick three items that just speak to you. And you're like, okay, where's this going? So I picked a clover flower and I picked a piece of broken off hanger and a rather sharp chunk of mulch. And she says, okay, now you have to devise three different teaching moments around these three, using these three objects. Yeah. So that was fascinating. Like, how are you going to use the, so you're given the object and tried your job is to figure out what to do with it.

Hannah: So what did you do with the hanger?

Charlene: With the hanger. Mousey hole. Right here. I'm like, we need some space right there. Can you hold that hanger right there? You don't squeeze it. Don't squeeze. there we go. Just let it hang. Wee. You know, wiggle it back and forth. There you go. Yeah.

Hannah: You can like twist it and make it that little, you know, when you have to stick a straw in the, in the F hole to keep your bow straight. You could do that.

Charlene: You could do that. You could, I mean, what's, what's another thing you could do?

You could actually just kind of attach it to their right elbow to remind them that it exists so that we don't end up with a lot of shoulder action. Because sometimes that's all you need to do is just touch, right? You could get them to do a bow hold on it. You could do... There you go. You could also think musically and say like this piece of music goes up and around. Just like this hanger hook, you know, doesn't it sound like that to you? You know, so it's a very circular music. It keeps going, you know, it's a great exercise. And I, and I, I tried to, I was working at a music school at the time and I brought that back to my other teachers who were not Suzuki trained. So they just looked at me like you are a crazy person. I go, yes, but, but hopefully I will engage the students.

Hannah: See that the hanger is very memorable

Charlene: Yeah, what are you doing with that? Let's find out.

Hannah: This podcast is Find Your Lilt and I've asked this on a teacher gathering call that we both attend with listeners fairly regularly. And so it's a topic that can keep coming up over and over and over again. But when you hear getting the real feel for Irish music and finding your lilt, what does that mean to you? And what are maybe some ways you would go about doing that?

Charlene: Sure. I always go back to the listening because you got to... I had a teacher in college, who and I think this has to do with it. and also I have a, can you hear that?

Hannah: I can hear the booms next door. yeah.

Charlene: So I teach next door to a music therapist and such, cause they're doing the drumming and such. So sometimes we get a free beat next door. It's great. Well, this is a conversational relaxing podcast where we might be listening to music on the side too. So there you go. It'll all work out. It'll all work out. Yeah. So anyway, my teacher in college, Dr. Thomas Wood, I've taken this to heart. He's applied it to intonation. He says in order to have perfect intonation, he says you need to have three things and that's radar, prep, and adjustment. And radar for him is expecting the correct note in your head. Right?

So whether that's from listening or figuring out what the interval is and knowing through sight singing and all that what that is. But to me I thought, yeah, that's what we're doing here. You need to know what it sounds like, like where this is going. You can't do it blind. That's like learning a foreign language just out of a book.

You cannot do this blind. You've got to go listen. So that's number one. And I'll tell you, I have a heck of a time still trying to get people to listen, which you'd think would be easier. But that is another topic for another day. And maybe we can come up with a mutual solution for that.

Hannah: Yes, I'll get you back on. And we'll dive all into listening.

Charlene: Yeah, because there's some tech problems that we did not used to have. And now we've got so much. Anyway. We'll stop there. So the idea is number one, listening. Definitely got to listen.

Number two, if we're going to like talk about it, right? You know, you've got kids and you've got adults and the kids, you just say, imitate this and they imitate it for the most part, you know? They don't ask you how, not necessarily. They don't ask you why. I just say, make it sound like this. And a lot of times they'll do that. Adults are a different story. They say, what are the intricacies of this? Tell me exactly what I need to do.

And so that's where I've kind of come up with, okay, how do I like take what I do and turn it into like physics vectors, basically. And so the conclusion I have come to is that Lilt or lift is based upon at least two factors. One of them is swing, which is keeping your notes unequal.

And the other, of course, is pulse or accents. You know, where you decide where your oomph is. And that can at least get you part of the way there. Bowings can, of course, are how we get the accents. And the rhythmic portion does come from both the right and left hand, depending upon what you're doing.

So we can separate it out into those two components. I can say, okay, let's play this reel with a bit of swing. Chugga -chugga -chugga -chugga -chugga -chugga -chugga -chugga -chugga. All right, now let's add some, let's do some pulse. Yuck -a -chugga -yuck -a -chugga -yuck -a -chugga, you know, and then, then you've got your, here's another word for it, chug. You should collect a list of synonyms for lisp. Find your chug. Find your chug. That's what Liz Carroll has called it. It's in her book. Find your chug. Nice.

Hannah: That just makes me think my roommate in college had a chihuahua pug mix, so it's called a chug. I was like, this is the perfect college dog.

Charlene: Chugga chugga. But it makes perfect sense. Chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga. Dancing helps so much, like just going to a ceili, you know, and just being unafraid to mess up, right?

Learning a jig step can help out a little bit. So I'm, I think, back to that VARK idea, right? Where I don't really know anything about it, but my thought right now is that some people might gravitate to one style of learning more than another. And I would argue that the more different pathways you're shown, the better chance you have of being able to call up this idea. Because our brains are networks, right? They're not just linear. One goes to the other. It goes to here and to here and to here and to there. So you want to give yourself the best chance of remembering how something goes, you find different ways to approach it. You read it, you listen to it, you write it down. You experience it. You catch it out on the instrument.

Yeah, I fully experience it. You also recognize that it exists because that's a hard one too. What is the difference between playing something straight out of the book and something with some good lift or lilt, right? And some people might not be able to discern that quite yet because they're still on the stage or like, what are those notes that you're playing?

Hannah: And then there's the people, like, what if you're listening to a different regional style where maybe they are a bit more straight in the tunes? Like, they still have, it's still Irish. It's not, like, it's not always going to be like, da, da, da, da, da.

Charlene: Like, it's straight, Clare hornpipes. You know, I say this as a hornpipe, but it doesn't have the bounce. I'm like, not in the way you think. And in fact, I'd be really curious to actually, this is going to sound really nerdy, but that's who I am. I would like to know what the, whatever it is, the swing percentages on stuff that we perceive as straight, you know, cause I bet there is still some swing.

Hannah: There's gotta be an app for that out there.

Charlene: You could easily do it in Audacity or whatever. You've gotta find, pick whatever spot you want. You might choose an instrument that's really easy to follow like banjo, right? Because that's got a real distinct boom right at the beginning. Fiddles a little tricky because you've gotta decide where the downbeat is in the waveform. But at least on banjo, you can just be like, okay, right when I see it plucked, boing, that is when I put my marker, measure them, do some math. I have a science background. Maybe I should mention this. I have a science background.

Hannah: I have a social science background.

Charlene: And you guys also have to analyze things. So there you go. Right. Yeah, I'm actually planning on releasing a blog at some point, once I figure this out properly, that I'm going to call the Fiddle Lab, and it's going to have my musings on all these things such as shoulder rest, chin rest stuff, how to, you know, being in tune. What is this? You know, all, all the things that my brain kind of goes through and maybe somebody will find interesting.

Hannah: So you'll definitely have to send it my way. Cause I will share it out with anybody and everybody and be like, here have the science.

Charlene: Absolutely. Like this is, this is where I live. I, and it's funny because I don't necessarily treat my music with science necessarily. I treat my music more on a feel basis. We could have a whole other podcast on why we learn specific tunes.

One of our reasons for learning tunes, because that is also interesting to me.

Hannah: It is indeed. Yes. And playing like even, I mean, we just played a session together a few weeks ago and like, I mean, as soon as you started, I was like, wow, this is like, you have, you've had that little, that lift just like, it's, it's kind of electric when you get started. So it was really a lot of fun to play with you and kind of attempt to match some of the amazingness you were doing over there.

Charlene: I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And that's what I like to I like to bring the danciness to the table. Some people like to bring the lyrical melody, you know, right, right through to it. But of the old players, one of my favorites is James Morrison.

Who's like, you know, it's just bouncy and maybe silly. I don't know, but I think it's awesome. Michael Coleman is often touted as one of the greats. I'm like, but that dude's got like no. Pump on what I'm what I want to hear anyway. I not none, obviously, but like not like James Morrison. So given your choices, I'm going, I want to sound like the bouncy guy. So it's like.

Maybe because I play for dancers. Like that's absolutely necessary. You cannot just play, you can't play notes without telling them where the phrases are. You've got to be dreadfully obvious so that they know where to be. And honestly, what's wrong with that? Nothing whatsoever. You know, like that's, that's.

that makes people happy and makes the dancers happy, so it makes me happy.

Hannah: Do you still have summer lesson slots or have they been snapped up instantly?

Charlene: I just signed up for Acuity. So, I'm working on, I've, I've been looking for something that, that does what I want it to do. And I think I can man, handle it into doing what I want it to do. And yeah, at some point on my website, I'll make sure it's like right on the front page. People can sign up for slots. I have ideally, I like to keep my lessons very regular in order to have good progress, you know, weekly people. But I also recognize that there's some people out there who just kind of want to check in every now and again. So what I would do is have like, I've got like 55 minutes, 40 minutes, and I've just now decided to do like a little 20 minute check -in sort of thing. Which might be kind of fun. We'll see how that goes. Cause both kids are going to be in school this fall. So maybe I'll have more brainstorms. The son is going to kindergarten. man. Yeah. The night month old at the beginning of the pandemic. he's just.

He's a lovely little kid and he's taking piano and he follows instructions generally and does all the stuff. You know, he's a real dream to teach. And then there's my daughter who's a riot and she's tricky, but she's intensely creative. She just wrote like a four page composition with her teacher. Yeah. I'm just like what, you know, she just needs some direction, but otherwise ideas, she can barf them out onto the page. So there you go. And then off she goes. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So having children has given me a new perspective on what sort of abilities you're drawn to or whatever you have that you're born with, your personality traits and the likes. And then of course, what we can do with those with talent education. So, anywho, there you go.

Hannah: Charlene, this has been amazing. I mean, there's so many other things I could talk to you about and I'm sure we will have more conversations as well. So, thank you for being on the Find Your Little Policest and we'll catch you next time.

Charlene: Definitely. We'll look forward to seeing you whenever, wherever that is.