Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Carder.
Adam, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I have been fascinated with music for a very long time, but always from the perspective of someone that couldn’t do it. Similar to an unathletic sports reporter, I never felt as if it was something I was capable of doing at a high level but something just wouldn’t let me move on, no matter how much I struggled.
After graduating from Ole Miss just before the crash of 2008, I found myself with a decision to make. With limited options, I would either take a soul-crushing job or go back to school and pay the bills as a bartender. I chose the latter and moved to Atlanta to audition for the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media. At Ole Miss, my priorities weren’t exactly where they needed to be. However, this time around I was determined to dominate. After graduating with honors in their guitar program, I found myself teaching private lessons to buy me some time before I became world-famous. The universe had other ideas for me, however, as I gradually realized that teaching was my thing. My mom was a teacher and she had been indirectly teaching me how to teach for my whole life. It just came naturally to me and before long, I was completely booked five days a week.
A crucial part of this process was realizing that I could do ok as a guitar teacher, but if I also taught keyboard, I could easily double my bookings. The importance of this wasn’t that I figured out how to make myself more valuable, it was the accidental realization that learning to play the keys made me a much better guitar player. Sensing an opportunity, I then set out to learn every instrument I could get my hands on, as well as production and recording.
There was no doubt that learning how to play several instruments allowed me to become a much better musician by connecting dots that I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed and giving me a deep understanding of Music, not just the guitar. Meta Music Education was born from the idea that students deserved a reimagined approach to lessons that would allow them to develop a strong, diversified, balanced foundation so that they could excel at any instrument. From my perspective, traditional music lessons were terribly antiquated, not just because the student often found themselves in a closet-sized room with a generic method book and a half-interested teacher, but there was no mention of what it meant to be a modern musician. Why wouldn’t we be recording songs as a process of learning your instrument(s) of choice? Even if all you have is an iPad, the immense amount of tools, practice aids, and opportunities for accelerated learning that clever use of GarageBand provides is too obvious to ignore. If the student had a truly creative space in which to learn, equipped with modern technology, guided by real musicians that love to teach, and the opportunity to truly collaborate and jam with other students – it would be a real game-changer… and thus, Meta Music Education was born.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Obviously Covid has been a huge bummer, but it has also been an opportunity for us to hit the reset button. We closed the studio on March 12th, transitioning all lessons to a virtual format on the fly. Our staff handled this flawlessly and while we were closed, I jumped at the chance to make extensive renovations and upgrades to the studio so that when we finally reopened on August 3rd, we could literally say that we are back and better than ever. Virtual lessons will always be a part of what we do and we’ve learned a lot from experience, but having everyone back in-studio (responsibly) has been incredibly rejuvenating.
Please tell us about Meta Music Education.
Meta Music Education is a hybrid concept that blurs the boundaries between “lesson studio” and “recording studio” into what is now commonly referred to as a maker space. If you take a painting class, you paint. If you take a pottery class, you make a flower pot and you give it to your mom. Why wouldn’t the same be true for music lessons? Whenever possible, our students (kids and adults) are learning by doing. Whether it’s electronic music production, guitar lessons, bass, drums, voice, or anything between, we show you how to trust your creative instincts, to collaborate with others, and how to apply the principles of accelerated learning to any discipline. (This is where the “Meta” comes from)—with regard to music, teaching it as a language instead of a series of facts to be memorized yields profoundly positive results. This is where our project-based approach really shines because it acts as an anchor for each student’s personalized curriculum.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I was really into baseball as a kid. We lived in Houston, Texas, during my prime childhood years and I’ll never ever forget the smell of walking into the Astrodome. Something about the air conditioning there just resonated with nostalgia, even at the time. Now that I think of it, walking into a Toys R Us used to induce a similar experience… something about the smell of plastic, overpriced toys take me to a happy place even to this day, although I’m not necessarily proud of it.
What role has luck (good luck or bad luck) played in your life and business?
I’m a believer in the “you make your own luck” philosophy, but one must also realize that there is only so much luck you can be responsible for. Being ready for the opportunity when it arises, recognizing it when it does (because it is seldom obvious), and playing the long game has been indispensable pillars of my experiment in taking calculated risks. To give you an example, in my early days of teaching, I had a student of about nine years old that wanted to learn a Bruno Mars song.
After working on it in the lesson, I sent him home with a chart and a video that I made about how to play it. To my horror, I got an angry phone call the next day from his dad because there were certain explicit themes in the second verse of the song that I was unaware of. (The song was basically one chord progression for the entire tune, but I made the mistake of not listening to the whole thing before sending him home with it). The key to this situation was that I realized I needed to make it right without worrying about the financial implications, so I offered them a month of lessons for free and a promise that I would never let that happen again. They accepted, and five years later, when I was denied startup funding by every bank in town, his family made a significant investment in the company. Without it, I doubt that we would be here today.
Contact Info:
- Address: 227 Sandy Springs Pl. NE Suite 362
Sandy Springs, GA 30328 - Website: www.MetaMusicEducation.com
- Phone: 404-458-6382
- Email: Studio@MetaMusicEducation.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/__metamusic__
- Facebook: www.Facebook.com/metamusiceducation
Image Credit:
Ian’s Friends
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