Jamming with Shine

After a break over the summer, the popular Shine Jam Sessions are back! Helmed by our awesome teacher Pedro Polo students of Shine are once again able to sign up to join in the jam, where they can showcase a musical piece they are working on, as well as jam with other students of the song elected for each jam!

Jamming in music is a fun, spontaneous way for musicians to come together and create music on the spot. It’s all about improvisation, collaboration, and exploring new sounds without a set plan. Whether you play jazz, rock, or any other genre, jamming helps you communicate through your instrument, develop creativity, and sometimes even discover new songs.

In Barcelona, jam sessions are a vibrant part of the music scene. Held in local bars and venues, these sessions let musicians of all levels meet, improvise, and build confidence in a relaxed setting. From jazz and blues to funk and rock, there’s a jam session for every style. Open mics are also popular, giving solo artists and bands the chance to perform in front of live audiences and connect with the local community.

At Shine Music School in Barcelona, our jam sessions offer students the perfect opportunity to practice and perform in a real-world setting. These sessions help students improve their improvisation, gain stage confidence, and collaborate with others. They’re also a great way to meet fellow musicians, explore different styles, and have fun while becoming part of Barcelona’s thriving music scene.

So ask your teacher about how to join our Jam! Or contact the school directly via mail or phone!

Our jams usually happen on the first weekend of every month! Join us on Instagram to stay updated!

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New Music from our Teachers

Shine Music School has a host of impressive and talented teachers. Many of whom are working on new music. Our teachers are often recording albums or performing, and continue to practice and learn everyday. They bring these talents and expertise into the classroom and each of their students can benefit from their knowledge.

Check out some of their new work!

Gian Carlo Scevola is one of our brilliant guitar teachers. He has been teaching with Shine since its humble beginnings in Barcelona, almost 10 years ago! Visit his profile to learn more about him, or sign up for lessons with Gian Carlo. Gian Carlo recently made it to the final of the International Music Competition of Cambra d ‘ Andorra, Amics Cambra Romànica with the Trío Desconcierto. Here is some of his new music with his Scevola Ensemble:

A new album by the accomplished César Munera titled Wood Mirror is out now. Cesar teaches guitar, specialising in fingerstyle guitar, classical guitar and flamenco guitar at Shine. Follow him on Instagram and enjoy frequent videos of his playing or contact us for a lesson. You can purchase his album on amazon or listen on Spotify.

Sebastian Pan, another of our superb guitar teaches plays in collaboration with Antonio Monasterio Ensemble in the video below. Sebastian frequently shares great videos performing on his really cool travel sized electric guitar on his Instagram. He teaches electric guitar at Shine. Contact us if you would like to do some lessons with Sebastian.

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Long Term Instrument Rental

Music is an important part of the human experience. Be it through song and dance, listening to music in a cafe or at home, going to a concert with your friends, or jamming with your band. People connect through music. Sound and rhythm are learned from early childhood, in fact babies start to hear and feel sound in the womb. Music helps us to develop and learn language as toddlers. It is part of our daily life, through movies, radio, and other places. You can sit on a terraza and buskers may pass you, playing on their instruments or singing. Music is such an integral part of being human.

As a parent you probably want to encourage a love of music, or as an individual maybe it is a hobby you would like to take up. Music can be an interesting career, with many aspects. From music production to teaching and performing. As a music school we understand the benefits of studying music and creating an environment where we can enjoy learning.

But studying music can also be daunting for a beginner, and without expert advice, it can be expensive and at worst, not a positive experience! With so many health benefits, from improving your cognitive abilities to actually being a physical workout and a stress reliever, studying music or learning an instrument should not be scary.

One vital aspect is your instrument! At Shine we offer fantastic rental instruments from our instrument rental department.

Imagine that your child wishes to start playing a musical instrument, or it’s been your dream to take a guitar class, but you just don’t know where to start. Perhaps you are spending a semester in Spain and don’t want to stop playing music, but shipping or flying with your instrument is not an option. Whatever situation you find yourself in, playing an instrument can be an expensive and often confusing endeavour as any professional musician will tell you.

This makes so much sense!

Test & Try

Hiring a musical instrument instead of buying one is an option that just adds up for multitude reasons. Not only can you try and test out a variety of instruments, but you also don’t have to make a huge investment in an instrument without some musical knowledge and know-how.

Grow with your Instrument

This is especially relevant when looking into instruments for children. More often than not, the instrument has to grow with your child. This can mean buying numerous instruments as your child requires a bigger size. A disaster if your kids decide they don’t want to play anymore, and also extra work if you have to keep buying and selling instruments.

Quality Instruments

Unfortunately as you will quickly discover, cheap instruments are difficult to play, tricky to tune, often sound bad, and in the end a cheap instrument regularly results in the player getting frustrated and not wanting to play. What a lost opportunity for musical discovery!

All your questions answered!

Long-term instrument rental is an affordable and flexible way to play an instrument. Hiring a digital piano or cello to play at home makes practice easy and practical. If you happen to move, you don’t have to lug a heavy or expensive instrument with you! You find that your musical experience will improve when you don’t have to worry about your instrument. If you are interested in finding out more, get in touch with us or head directly over to our website, where you can hire your instrument online through a few easy steps!

We have a wide array of instruments from quality brands, from beginner instruments to advanced instruments.

Want to know about how it works? 

CONTACT US
Click to WhatsApp: +34 930 11 2282
Click to Call: +34 930 11 2282

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Enjoy music with your Children!

Connecting through music is an important part of the human experience. From the first moments that our ears develop in the womb, we are exposed to sounds. Heartbeats, breathing, and the sound of our mothers voice.

Music has been scientifically proven to benefit us in many ways, studying music develops a multitude of skills as well as actually “working out” our brains, making our synapses fire faster, and helping us to make faster connections. Humans use sound, music, and dance to communicate, and they are vital to developing our emotional abilities. Music is used in therapy, in expression, in connection. And you don’t have to be able to play and instrument or be able to sing to enjoy music, an to share it with others!

As a parent, we find ourselves responsible for encouraging development and facilitating experiences where our children can discover music. Starting early is fantastic but you can include musical activities from any age. Better late than never, just remember it’s all about positive reinforcement. If you are excited about music, your child will naturally develop a love for it too!

Musical Activities to do with Kids

Singing may not be the easiest for everyone, and not everyone sings well. But singing is proven to be a huge health benefit, and singalongs soften any off-key voice! Take off the pressure! Make a fun and easy kids music playlist and choose a time of day to have a sing-a-long. Bath time is great, or perhaps if you travel by car, you can have a go-to car playlist. Another great way to include music in your day, is a nap time play list. Focus on softer, quieter music, you may even find that certain songs start putting your kids to sleep no matter where they are and can be a huge help in soothing kids if they are not feeling well, or are out of their comfort zone (in a holiday hotel, or needing a nap after a strenuous day)

Play musical games, or set up musical games for them to play with friends. Musical games are perfect for developing rhythm and listening skills. They are also great for getting moving and using up all that boundless energy that kids have. Make up your own games or add music to existing ones.

Have a dance party! This is a great way to expose your kids to different musical genres! You may be surprised by what kind of music they like! Try to include a range or make different playlists for different dance parties. Then for 20 mins or so, pick the smaller kids up and dance with them on your hips, or hold hands or just dance around the house or garden together!

Make Instruments or play on toy instruments. Bang pots and pans, plastic bowls or cups. Make shakers from rice and beans, try create a water xylophone. Play with sound and music. Facilitate an environment where the kids can create their own songs. If they are into videos, you can always incorporate the idea of making a music video. This activity can include other materials, drawing and painting, writing music, thinking about how the music video will look, and filming the whole thing. If the kids are older, it can be a fun idea to add in editing the video. Your kids will be making Tiktok or youtube videos before long anyway!

Take small babies and toddlers to a music sensory group. They will be exposed to different sounds and musical experiences. Repetition, like clapping is great for memory and helps with language development. You can then repeat these games and activities at home and incorporate music into your life. Make up songs for doing chores like tidying up or brushing teeth. It turns these otherwise boring activities into a fun game and can involve other learning like counting or movement!

Watch musical movies. Kids love tv, there’s no doubt! So pick out some movies with great songs that you can sing together, or series about music and bands. If they are older perhaps make movie playlists, have a family movie night, and watch a movie about their favourite band or singer, or even a movie with a great soundtrack! Disney has a whole host of musical movies for all ages.

Get out there! Experience music outside of the home! Take your kids out to the theatre to see a musical, expose them to music festivals or concerts from a young age. You can always buy sound softening headphones for the littlest kids, or choose more family oriented concerts. Not only will they be seeing how great music is in the context of the wider world, but going to a weekend concert is a great event for the whole family.

15 GREAT SONGS FOR KIDS

We offer music classes for kids! Our teachers are specialised in teaching instruments to children from as young as 4 years old and we offer Music Awareness Group classes as well. Find out more about our current online classes for children or lessons offered at our Barcelona School!

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The first musical instruments

Music is known as the universal language. No matter where it comes from, everyone is capable of perceiving the feelings it evokes. Knowing for sure when our ancestors first developed music is still a matter of debate. What we do know is that the history of musical instruments goes back to the beginning of human culture.

Can you imagine then what could have been the first musical instrument created by man?

Although there is no exact date for the creation of the first musical instrument, archaeological finds suggest that there was music from primitive times and that percussion and wind instruments were the first to appear.

The voice was probably the origin of the man’s musical expression through the songs together with the accompaniment of hands and feet following a rhythm, such as a horn to signal success in hunting, or a drum in a religious ceremony. We know that the oldest known drum dates back 30,000 years when man used the stretched skin of animals to create sound.

From archaeological sites in Europe, bamboo flutes, whistles, brawlers and tubes made of short bones have been found that produced sound when blown through them. 

The discovery in the cave of Hohle Fels, Germany, of a flute carved from vulture bones more than 35,000 years old, could be the oldest musical instrument created by man. It also demonstrates the presence in Europe of sociable and creative humans, who preceded the Neanderthals.

Some consensus among the scientific community suggests that the first flutes date from about 37,000 years ago. However, most historians believe that it is impossible to determine the specific time of the invention of musical instruments, since many of the first musical instruments were made from animal skins, bones, wood, and other non-durable materials.

Over time, in each society new musical instruments were created and they were adapted to different areas of life. Here are some examples:

The Jewish shofar, a wind instrument made from a hollow animal horn, is still played on Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), and must be heard by the congregation.

Since the ancient Chinese empire, the instruments were identified with the cardinal points, with the seasons and with natural phenomena. The use of the bamboo flute or dizi in traditional Chinese music became very popular.

In medieval Europe, trumpets, long associated with military operations, had a ceremonial role in the establishment of European kings and nobles and were in fact considered a sign of nobility.

The harp is known to have been used from early times in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India and was imported to China after the end of the 4th century AD.

In Greece, the standard plucked instrument was the lyre, known in its fully developed form as kithara (or sitara in India). Years later, the Arabs added a neck to the well-known kithara, and baptized the instrument as an alud (lute in Spain), which would later become a vihuela with the arrival of Romans and Arabs to Spanish lands. first musical compositions for guitar.

Drum ensembles reached extraordinary sophistication in Africa, and the small, hand-beaten drum is of great musical importance in West Asia and India. The native cultures of the Americas have always made extensive use of drums, as well as other beaten and shaken instruments.

Bowed instruments came to characterize Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. By the 16th century, the European violin was already distinguished in two ways: the viola (leg violin) and the violin (arm violin). The violin or violin was the smallest of the family, the tenor was simply called viola, while the bass became known as violoncello (diminutive of violone).

Of all the oldest instruments, the organ showed the most remarkable development from the High Middle Ages to the 17th century. Created in ancient Greece in the 3rd century b.C, this instrument evolved from small portable designs for smaller churches to increase in size and carry overlapping keyboards, placing them in boxes like the way we know today.

The clarinet or “small trumpet” emerged in the late 17th century and, like the oboe, gave rise to a family that extended to a double bass clarinet in the 19th century and later to a sub-bass. Clarinets have been in the orchestra since approximately 1780.

In 1845, the Belgian instrumentalist and luthier Antoine-Joseph Sax, built a family of valve instruments called saxhorns, using the cornet as the basis for his invention. Sax invented the saxophone, a single reed instrument like the clarinet but with a conical tube.

By all historical accounts, the Rickenbacker Frying Pan (named for its resemblance to a banjo with a frying pan) was the first electric guitar invented in America by the German immigrant Adolph Rickenbacher during the 1920s. The problem for guitarists in those years was the volume, since the acoustic guitar could not be heard well when used in large bands and orchestras with singers. Years later, the development of the concept of electricity and radio technology facilitated the creation of the instrument we know today.

In the 60s different styles of music were created, as many artists began to experiment with the use of synthesizers. One of the first to appear was BUCHLA in 1963, by composer Morton Subotnick. Elements of piano and percussion were combined with electronic sounds, thus abandoning the traditional music of always.

It’s clear that humans and music have a deep and long connection that goes back through the centuries. Music is here to stay, and as people continue to play and invent, new and wonderful instruments continue to emerge.

If you are interested in music and learning an instrument, browse our menu and see what sort of sound interests you. Visit our teachers pages and get to know them too! You may be the next inventor of a new age of music!

Sources: 

Wikipedia, BBC Mundo, LiveScience, EuropaPress, Britannica, Lacarne Magazine

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