Summer Music Lessons at Dublin School of Music

The school year stops in June. Learning an instrument does not have to.

Every summer we run lessons through July and into August, and they tend to attract two quite different people: students who have been learning all year and do not want to lose ground over the break, and complete beginners who finally have the time to start something they have been putting off.

Both are good reasons. Summer is, in several respects, the easiest time of year to learn an instrument.

Why summer suits learning

• There is time to practise. The single biggest obstacle during term is that practice competes with homework, matches and everything else. In July that competition disappears, and students who practise properly over a summer often come back in September noticeably ahead of where they left off.
• Nine weeks off undoes real progress. Playing an instrument is a physical skill, and physical skills decay without use. A student who stops entirely in June spends much of September recovering ground rather than gaining it.
• It is a low-risk way to start. Beginning in summer means arriving at the new school year already able to play a little, rather than starting from nothing alongside everything else that September brings.
• You can try an instrument without committing to a year. A few summer lessons are enough to find out whether something suits you, which is a far better test than deciding in the abstract.

What you can learn

All eleven instruments are available over the summer, taught one-to-one as they are during term:

• Piano
• Guitar
• Classical Guitar
• Bass Guitar
• Singing
• Violin
• Drums
• Saxophone
• Clarinet
• Flute
• Ukulele
• Recorder & Tin Whistle

Lessons run at all three schools — Terenure, Tallaght and Stillorgan — and are open to every age and level, from a six-year-old who has never touched an instrument to an adult returning after twenty years away.

If you are starting from scratch

Summer is a particularly forgiving time to begin, because the early weeks on any instrument are the hardest and there is no school term running alongside them to compete for attention.

If you are not sure which instrument to choose, that is the normal starting position rather than a problem — we have written about how to choose one for a child, and about when children are ready to start, which varies a good deal by instrument.

Adults, for what it is worth, are among our most successful summer students. They have the time, they choose their own repertoire, and they are there because they decided to be. If you gave something up years ago, you would not be the first to come back to it.