2019

This year is our 10th anniversary!!

Thanks for coming out to our Christmas “Winter Sing.”  Students performed holiday songs and standards on guitars, ukuleles, banjo and mandolin.

If you couldn’t make it, we hope you can next year!

Strings Attached continued serving youth through individual weekly classes.  We also toured 9 branches of the St. Louis County Library  system from March through July providing ukulele lessons to teens.

The library system now loans out ukuleles, guitars, banjo’s , electric guitars,  keyboards, beat boxes and bongos to patrons, making libraries very musical places to be!  You can also check out songbooks and books on the history of music.  We’re happy to be a part of the musical library movement that’s shaping up across the country.

Fall 2019, we had a new group of young ukulele players, ages 5 to 8,  who started with us.  We’re had a cool time learning some chords, strumming and singing songs.  A couple of our new players are already writing their own songs to sing for the class.  What talent and happiness! 

Our 2019 summer ensemble  worked hard putting together instrumental songs that include harmonized parts on banjitar, ukulele, guitar and mandolin. We culminated the sessions with some recordings of their work before they headed back to school.

Listen to some of the Summer String Ensemble!:

Thanks for joining us on June 21st for Make Music Day Open House at the parish hall, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Ferguson.   Youth musicians ages 5 to 17 played some songs or jammed with us on 12 bar blues and Wes Montgomery’s “Bumpin”.  Moms and dads also participated in playing and singing music with youth as well!

We included an instrument discovery area, where kids could get hands-on tryouts of dulcimers, hammer dulcimer, bells, keyboards, congas and others.

We also had a partnership with Walnut Grove elementary school in Ferguson to help get their music teacher, James Young set up with 30 ukuleles to be used in music classes at the school. James was awarded 2021 Missouri Teacher of the Year! Congratulations James!! Read the story on NPR StL

Strings Attached hopes to continue this effort in expanding the use of ukuleles with kids in nearby elementary schools and supporting their music teachers however we can!

Looking to create a new collection of student/adult recordings in 2020.  We’ve produced 4 CD’s of material to date and if you haven’t heard any of our recordings, check them out at http://www.reverbnation.com/stringsattachedproject  or at http://www.soundcloud.com/guitarkestra

Check out a featured article about Strings Attached on Reverb at The Strings Attached Project: Instruments and Music Education for Kids of All Backgrounds | Reverb Gives . At Reverb Gives a portion of every sale of instruments sold on Reverb provides students, teachers, and leaders of music programs across the world with instruments they need.

2019 began with a field trip with our students & parents to the St. Louis Science Center for a special exhibit: “Guitar, the Instrument that Rocked the World.”  The exhibit tied together the history, engineering and science behind the guitar & ukulele with examples of instruments, how they are constructed, hands-on exhibits about electromagnetism, waveforms/sound waves, vibration, structural engineering, acoustics and a variety of guitars, banjos, ukuleles forming the history of guitars.

Students were treated to a new storybook on the childhood of guitarist/inventor Les Paul entitled, “Guitar Genius” by Kim Tomsic  in exchange for their drawings of the Les Paul persona, “Rhubarb Red” “Rhubarb Red” is the stage name Les Paul used when he began his career as a professional musician here in St. Louis on KMOX radio.  We collected interesting artifacts from Rhubarb Red’s career this spring and will celebrate Les Paul’s birthday with slices of rhubarb pie!

Listen to this interview  on the “Music History Project” with Les Paul about his early childhood that led to many of his inventions in guitar, recordings and how he overcame the many setbacks in his life:  LES PAUL on the MUSIC HISTORY PROJECT

The Strings Attached project connects youth, ages 5 to 17, with music education using American roots music. We learn to play instruments such as guitar, ukulele, dobro, banjitar and mandolin.  If you would like to learn more about the project, please click on the file symbol above and to the left.

You can also email us with any questions at stringsattachedproject@hotmail.com.

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