Shameless Product Promotion

This year at AMTA, I was the winner of a chance drawing. I won five YOUROCK guitars. Now, out of all of the things that I put a ticket towards, these guitars were the last choice that I made and seemed to be the least interesting for me, but I have changed my mind.


 My package arrived at my music therapy clinic yesterday and contained my new instruments. Now, when I first saw these, I thought they were just for playing Guitar Hero, but then I started to examine the box more carefully.


These are actually electric guitars with MIDI capability, synthesizer presets, and gaming capabilities.


I work with adolescents (and some children, but mostly adolescents) who are enamored by the thought of an electric guitar. They are interested in guitars in general, but really interested in electric guitars. I have not had one that is in working condition since I moved to this job, and I have always told my students that I can't afford to get as many as I would need for my group music lessons. This event changed all that talk forever.


Anyway, back to the shameless product promotion that this blog entry is named for...


I took my first guitar out of the box to see what was going on with the instrument. I found some batteries, put them in, turned it on...and nothing. I went to the instruction book (which should have been read first, but I was excited) and found that the guitar did not play on its own. I plugged it into the amplifier and "Voila." Music came out, beautiful, rich, and electric! I played around for some time and tried to get my students interested. They were not impressed, but that particular group of adolescents is not often interested in what I show them - they prefer to choose their own instruments. The next group was much more interested - boding well for the rest of my students.


I have not completely read the instruction manual, so I am still learning about what I can do with these instruments, but I can tell you that I am now seeing lots of advertisements for these things - amazon.com, thinkgeek, and other websites are promoting the YOUROCK guitars this year. I can tell you that my excitement over winning these instruments just continues to grow as I can start to see lots of things that I can do with students in my music therapy practice.


Sorry for the shameless plug, but I think these things are really going to open up new horizons for my clients and for me as well.

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