streamline this for a long time, and one of the good things that came out of the pandemic was that all of a sudden I had a lot of extra time to do it. So, I wrote out the whole plan for AmpliTeach and found a company to code it for me and really created an all-in-one solution.” A CURRICULUM-BASED PLATFORM McCarthy said the one feature he felt was key to incorporating into AmpliTeach was the curriculum he’d built over decades of teaching. “When you’re running a music school, I’ve found it’s not how many students you get, it’s keeping those students,” McCarthy said. “And having your teachers trained on how to teach while having a good cur- riculum is important. You can have the best players in the world working at your music school, but if they don’t know how to teach, students aren’t going to stay with it. I wanted to focus on not only what the admins needed, but also what the teachers needed so that you could give teachers the resources to teach at the highest level.” Additionally, AmpliTeach houses unique resources for students, including short quiz- zes and ear training exercises, as well as a place for teachers to assign practice materi- als specific to the student. “There’s more than 5,000 lessons that we’ve put into this curriculum already, and students have access to videos, au- dio tracks and PDFs that all correspond with each lesson in the book,” McCarthy explained. “At the end of a lesson, with just one click, a teacher can send all these resources to the student to use at home. Normally, the student is playing with their teacher once a week. Now, suppose they go home and they’re wondering what fingers they’re supposed to use for a particular scale, they no longer have to wait until next week for the answer.” MARKET YOUR PROGRAM Simplifying the lesson program process further, AmpliTeach features an autopay system that, thanks to its relationship with Visa’s authorize.net, allows students to pay monthly and sends out an automatic text message or email to remind parents. “Another useful tool AmpliTeach offers is our lesson reminder texts,” McCarthy said. “We have 48-hour lesson reminder texts that go out so students don’t forget about their lesson. At my lesson studios — Rock House School of Music — if you don’t give the teacher 24 hours notice, the
student still pays for their forgotten les- son, so with these automated messages, it eliminates the amount of teachers waiting on students who don’t show up.” Outside of its included curriculum, sched- uling and billing capabilities, AmpliTeach also equips music store and studio owners with marketing materials and best-practice PDFs designed to help start, run and grow their lesson programs. From downloadable forms and documents that teachers and ad- mins need to keep their programs running to sales training PDFs and info on how to
start and grow social media accounts for a business — all of the info is housed in the “build my biz” portion of the platform. “Basically, we’re looking to equip les- son program administrators with every- thing they need to successfully run their program,” McCarthy said. “We officially launched the program at last January’s NAMM show to really great response. We’ve worked out all the bugs and re- ceived great feedback so far. Now, we’re excited to be able to bring this platform to a wider audience.” MI
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