This August we hosted a ‘Piano Day’ in our Hove shop. We were delighted to welcome some guest speakers to talk about piano learning and teaching. The aim of the day was to showcase some new tools in the landscape of piano tuition, as well as bring pianists together to discuss and share ideas.

We had a full house for our recent Piano workshop with Melanie Spanswick, author of the wonderful Play It Again: Piano books and Samantha Ward who presented the very popular Piano Junior series on behalf of Hans-Gunter Heumann.

Despite a wet day in Hove, all attendees arrived promptly and were greeted with hot drinks, biscuits and goody bags. Melanie then spoke in depth about her books and had a question and answer session with the teachers. A hearty lunch followed, after which staff members Kirsten Lloyd Leach and Miles Vernon Ward presented the Casio Grand Hybrid Range, ably assisted by Andy Brown and Jack Terroni from Casio. They spoke about the teacher incentive scheme which launched recently as the ‘Grand Hybrid Teacher Network.” For more information go to info.casio.co.uk/pianoteachernetwork

Kirsten’s presentation on the Grand Hybrid range was excellent, and well worth reading through for anyone interested. The presentation can be found here.

The afternoon session continued with Samantha Ward demonstrating a lot of the exercises from the Piano Junior series. Three of her pupils had kindly offered to come along and play from the books and a lot of the attending teachers joined in as well! The afternoon ended with teachers topping up their sheet music collections thanks too our extra in store discount, and most of them left with signed copies of Melanie’s Play it Again books.

It was a lovely day enjoyed by everyone present and we are hopeful for plenty more events like this in our branches. You’ll next see the Ackerman Team at the ABRSM Conference in London on Saturday 3rd November.