So I had an idea the other day and I wanted to see what people thought about it - see if it sounded like something that would be successful or not.
I heard from a friend recently that the National marching band organization "DCI" (I believe. Forgive me as I'm not the most familiar with the marching band world) recently passed a rule saying that school band directors can now use keyboards and or sequences (with certain limitations of course) in marching band competitions. So now, as I've heard here and there, band directors are buying keyboards to incorporate into their shows. This is great for the kid who plays piano, they can now participate more in marching band with their own instrument rather than having to learn mallets or something. There are going to be many different keyboards that people buy but some of the more popular ones are workstations like the Korg Triton series, Yamaha motif series, Roland Fantoms, etc.
I consider myself to be fairly proficient with keybaords. I'm very familiar with Korg keyboards as I have a Triton Extreme, and I can find my way around the motifs as well. I know that these keyboards are very complex. You can spend a little time and learn the very basic functions that allow you to make some noise but after that it can become quite complex, especially if you have aspirations of designing a sound or doing any kind of programing.
As part of my regular gigs as a pianist such as accompanying, teaching, transcribing etc. I was thinking I could offer a service of meeting with band directors and giving them a sort of one time workshop and teach them all about their keyboard and how to utilize its abilities. If they've been able to invest some money into this instrument I would imagine that they'd want to use it for as much as it's worth. In fact, I'll bet the same could be said for many church music directors as well.
These are just thoughts bouncing around in my head. I just know that I've had my particular workstation for a couple years now and have spent many many hours studying and working with it and I still have much yet to learn. So I imagine that there would be a lot of need out there for some hands on instruction.
What do you guys think?
