SWEETWATER'S NEW EDUCATION TASK FORCE

If you're an educator in the field of music, all too often you hear that money is tight and that budgets are shrinking. You hate hearing that, and so do we. Sweetwater's commitment to supporting music educators and teachers never ends, because we believe strongly that exposure to the arts is critical for today's young people. That's why we've established our own in-house Education Task Force to make absolutely certain that you have access to valuable resources that can enhance and augment your efforts in music education, and we plan to take an active role wherever we can to help educators implement any and all music programs that involve current technology.

Music is everywhere today, and it's truly a universal language that transcends most cultural barriers, and more importantly, the newest technology is truly exciting to students, making it more likely that they will want to learn about music and then stick with it. We know from personal experience exactly how this exposure can enrich everyone's lives.

So what does all this mean to you, a music educator with a mission to teach America's youth about the pleasures of playing and creating music? Educational instruction involving the use f current high-tech music hardware and software offers unique possibilities for music education. Adoption of this technology, along with a clever and well-planned curriculum will give faculty members the tools to educate their students in almost all the musical disciplines: keyboard performance, electronic music synthesis, the physics of sound, composition and many more.

Of course, the tools you need to achieve these goals are of utmost importance, so you want to be sure that you not only get the right equipment, but that you have a support staff available to make sure it all runs perfectly together and answer all your questions. With the resources that we have at our disposal here at Sweetwater, we are capable of designing a MIDI studio or keyboard lab from small, single station setups to huge, multi-station keyboard labs. We'll work with you, within your budget, to help you achieve outstanding results almost immediately.

Just a few of our credits include the Merrillville Community School District (Indiana), where we installed both a multi-station MIDI keyboard and computer lab, as well as a complete digital audio recording studio for use by both high school and junior high school students.

At Indiana University (see photo above), we've completed Phase One of what will be a three year project to place 360 (yes, that's three hundred and sixty!) MIDI stations into the brand new all-digital music library on the main IU campus in Bloomington. Each station consists of a personal computer (either Mac or IBM/PC) with a selection of Mark of the Unicorn and Coda software, as well as a Kurzweil K2000 or K2500 sampling synthesizer. Once completed, this will be the largest installation of its kind in the world and will help to define the direction of similar educational installations in the years to come.

Other institutions we've worked with include the University of Colorado, New York University, Seattle Pacific, University of Texas in Austin and the University of Cincinnati to name a few.

We believe Sweetwater Sound should be your first choice should you (or your school) plan to add any of the following to your music program: portable electronic keyboards or synthesizers, personal computers for use with music applications, a single station MIDI system for music composition and arranging, a multiple station MIDI lab to teach piano theory and composition, or digital recording workstations and multitrack studios.

Sweetwater will be exhibiting at the following shows (among others) this year: Ohio Music Educators (Toledo, Jan.30-Feb.1), Texas Music Educators Association (San Antonio, Feb.13-15), Eastern Regional MENC Conference (Baltimore, Feb.27-Mar.1), and Southern Regional MENC Conference (Nashville, Mar, 25-28). We hope to see you there (call us for additional information about any of these conferences or access information on our Web Site at "www.sweetwater.com/shows/"). Together we can make sure that music remains a vital part of the country's educational curriculum. So don't hesitate to give us a call - we're here to help.

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