Note: March 18, 2026 was the five-year anniversary for this bootcamp. Permanent price change and coupon 5YEARANNIV good for remainder of 2026.

You love music, yet have struggled — possibly for years — with trying to learn an instrument. Or maybe you love to sing, but lack the confidence to join your local choir.

Think about the parent of a child who clearly enjoys music, and yet, that child doesn’t like to practice. Should you or a child continue playing an instrument if every lesson ends with breaking down in tears?

Maybe you’re wondering how you’re going to become a musician when you may have school, a full-time job, a family, or modern life in general.

You may have found someone who sings or plays an instrument beautifully, and they may even be your music teacher. You’re trying to learn from them but for some reason, you can’t reach them, and they can’t teach you.

Maybe you’re a music educator looking to turbo-charge your students’ progress.

You might be asking, “How do I know if I can do that (or have already done that)?”

Question:

Can you sing named pitches using “CDE” or “do re mi” while conducting time?

If you can, then you have a musical foundation similar to the 26 letters of the English alphabet, that you can use to learn an instrument, sing in a choir with confidence, etc. If not, you will struggle needlessly, and waste an enormous amount of valuable time.

If you are thinking any number of things like:

• “This sounds impossible!”

• “I can’t sing”

• “I just want to learn by ear”

• “I don’t have a good ear”

• “I already hate practicing, this is going to make things worse!”...

Once that happens, it’s a simple matter of introducing a new concept each time and stepping up one rung on a ladder again and again until suddenly, you’ve built that alphabetic foundation for becoming a musician. As with learning to read, the process of learning to read music requires we build new circuitry in the brain. But the process of encountering brand new music and breaking it down quickly never changes, therefore, we’re not really spending time practicing to polish or perfect anything, we’re encountering short, new songs we’ve never seen again and again and “practicing” the process of encountering new music and breaking it down quickly.

When both the brain AND body engages in learning how sound moves through time, this drastically reduces the cognitive load so that the brain can begin to focus on managing music at a higher level, as opposed to being mired in the weeds, in the same way you're reading this now without thinking about specific letters of the alphabet or grammar.
 
So how do we do this?

Those who didn't become professional musicians became doctors, lawyers, executives, educators, entrepreneurs, and technologists like myself, because we learned as children it was easy to apply ourselves when we knew how to get measurable results. This affected not only our music trajectories, it cultivated within us radical mindset shifts that affected every aspect of our lives from that point on.

In 2014, we lost the last teacher at French School. We assumed his wife Judy would sell the school because she herself was not a music teacher.

Instead, music teachers familiar with the prestigious history of the school jumped in to teach piano, violin, guitar, and other instruments to keep the school going, and the school continued on, but not in the way it had when our teachers led the school.

For nearly two years, Judy also tried to find a music teacher to restart solfege classes at the school, without luck. As a parent of two children who took piano lessons and solfege classes with Yvonne Combe, nothing she saw replicated the solfege methodology we had been taught.

Eventually Judy asked me to reboot those classes. Now, my last piano and solfege lesson had been in 1982. To catch up, I auditioned at Juilliard's Evening Division to take a composition class and was accepted. What happened next was astonishing.

In January 2016 we restarted solfege classes at French School while I simultaneously started my Juilliard class.

• Within three months, one student surprised her parents with a solo performance at a school event.

• At the one year mark, two students began exhibiting signs of having absolute pitch.

• After two years a 5th grader played recorder, ukulele, jazz saxophone, and a little piano.

• At two and a half years, those who initially exhibited "tone deaf" characteristics could now sing on pitch with piano accompaniment, and the then 6th grader was experimenting with music composition.

When asked what music training they got in their schools, the universal response was crinkled faces and “that stuff is so easy!!”. That's when we realized how effective Yvonne Combe’s methodology was.

However, this section is being written in an era when global pandemic and wars are no longer academic thought experiments.

Culture is more than a leisurely pastime. It is deeply connected to our identities, people, nationalities, etc. War is about erasing those same things. This is when war and culture become strange bedfellows, and those who are artists, creators, and preservers of art and culture, end up playing roles more important than just the enjoyment of a leisurely pastime.

Learning the musical equivalent of the alphabet helps people understand the structure of music deeply, which enables them to fully and richly express, maintain and when needed, rebuild and renew their cultural and national identity. The fact that Judy and I were able to impact a new generation of music students with this methodology when we lost our teachers, Judy was not a music educator and my last lessons at French School were in 1982 not only shows how effective the methodology is, it also shows that it is a viable methodology when people are forced to build or rebuild with little to no formal training.

Would you like to learn more about the specific methodology that got these results for generations of French School alumni, that would enable you to become a musician, maybe even help others become musicians someday?