on teaching:

"My philosophy is to have fun playing an instrument, regardless of whether or not you've had any musical experience. Most of my students simply want to learn to play for their own pleasure, so I try to provide the right balance of learning and fun. Playing an instrument can become a life-long love!" - IJ


**ij's new guitar blog!**

A new blog just for guitar students...more articles soon to come!


a basic strum :

More of IJ's videos HERE

An IJ Performance:


guitar-related articles:

Chord Keys- which chords relate to each other

guitar-related news:

Is Your New Guitar Environmentally Friendly? - "Western musicians delight in the world's best and most exotic guitars, but it is claimed Chinese-made instruments are fuelling an illegal trade in rare timber." Read more...

You can actually PLAY this t-shirt guitar! "Now that ‘s a real bit of funny stuff around the corner. There was a fight between the actual electric guitar and its digital counterpart and guess what? The virtual guitar had to find a new sanctuary and it took solace on the face of a Tee. It wasn’t all easy at first but it made things pretty interesting." Check it out.

Can This Guitar Change Music Games? - Seems closer to the real thing to me!

Guitar Hero Sales Continue to Decline - bad economy or just burnout?


About Irene

Irene Jackson has been a songwriter and guitar player for more than 40 years...her accomplishments include many live performances, composing music for several nationally and internationally syndicated television shows, and releasing four of her own recordings in her Moonstone Productions studio. She is a member of SOCAN, and has been a member of the Pacific Music Industry Assoc. (PMIA) and the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC). She has taught hundreds of guitar students of all ages since 1989. E-mail or call Irene at (250)888-3973 for more info or to set up a free consultation.

Music can improve learning, boost language skills: study

Scientists believe learning musical sounds could enhance the brain’s ability to adapt
NEW YORK — Learning to play a musical instrument can change your brain, with a U.S. review finding music training can lead to improved speech and foreign language skills. Although it has been suggested in the past that listening to Mozart or other classical music could make you smarter, there has been little evidence to show that music boosts brain power.
But a data-driven review by Northwestern University has pulled together research that links musical training to learning that spills over into skills including language, speech, memory, attention and even vocal emotion.
Researcher Nina Kraus said the data strongly suggested that the neural connections made during musical training also primed the brain for other aspects of human communication.
“The effect of music training suggests that, akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness and thus requires society to re-examine the role of music in shaping individual development,” the researchers said in their study.
Kraus said learning musical sounds could enhance the brain’s ability to adapt and change and also enable the nervous system to provide a scaffolding of patterns that are important to learning. The study, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, looked at the explosion of research in recent years focused on the effects of music training on the nervous system, which could have strong implications for education.
The study found that playing an instrument primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and co-ordination with other musicians.
“A musician’s brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound,” Kraus said in a statement. “In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean.”
The study reviewed literature showing, for example, that musicians are more successful than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words. Children who are musically trained are better at observing pitch changes in speech and have a better vocabulary and reading ability than children who did not receive music training. Musicians trained to hear sounds embedded in networks of melodies and harmonies are primed to understand speech in a noisy background.
But Kraus said currently what is known about the benefits of music training on sensory processing beyond that involved in musical performance is largely derived from studying those who are fortunate enough to afford such training.
The researchers concluded that there needed to be a serious investment of resources into music training in schools accompanied with rigorous examinations of the effects of such instruction on listening, learning, memory, attention and literacy skills.