In February I took on my first commission, when an organist friend passed on a request he received through WAMTA. It was for 10 recordings of hymns on the organ, which will be turned into a video with lyrics for people to sing along to. I wrote the arrangements, with…
I had a wonderful evening volunteering with Reverb at Lorde’s “Ultrasound” tour in Perth tonight. I’d previously signed up as a volunteer with Green Music Australia, and they kindly passed on the opportunity. I spent 3.5 hours at the Reverb Action Village, encouraging concert goers to take actions related to…
Today I launched the WA Music Education Network, the obvious evolution of a newsletter that connects over 800 music education and associations. I had started building up resources for music educators here on this website, but it made more sense to split those resources off to a dedicated website. There…
A milestone today – my 15th published arrangement has just gone live! After initially making my organ arrangement of The Holy City available for free download when I first started using MuseScore, I was shocked when they started emailing stats in January 2021 to find it had 1800 views and…
I published an arrangement of Mental As Anything’s “Live It Up” on Friday, which brings the total of contemporary pieces published to 5. I decided to reorganise how I post the contemporary arrangements on the Music With Simone Shop, as I’m aiming to continue to add several new pieces each…
I’ve decided to move my arrangements of sheet music to a dedicate website on a subdomain of this one, so that I can handle all the sales of pieces in the public domain in house. I discovered that most traffic to my arrangements was coming to my website first and…
We now have a second music room set up in our home studio in Canning Vale, to provide rock drum lessons for beginners. The drum teacher, Ariana, is currently available on Sundays and Tuesdays. 30 min drum lessons are available at $35 per half hour. There is no minimum commitment.…
I’ve just added a new section to this website with a variety of free practice resources to use at home. I’d already been some of these with students last year. I have also started trialling Boom Cards as another possible resource to use. Rather than customising exercises and randomisers over…
For face to face exams, scales will be asked in a random order. Once scales are confident, it is a good idea to practise them in random orders to minimise relying on muscle memory of a specific order. For a few years now, I’ve used the “Wheel of Names” website…
I have started encouraging students who are working towards AMEB exams in grades 3 and above and are in specialist music programs at school to consider enrolling to complete the AMEB Award over the next 12 months. For students in Years 11 and 12, the AMEB Award is an endorsed…