The LA Music Academy was constructed from a blueprint of educational intentions that, a decade after the first class began, has earned a genuine celebration of its sincerity and ambition.

The school's primary purpose is simple yet original in concept — students gain experience through daily performances in bands made of professional musicians, thus enabling the school's environment to uniquely emulate the professional world that awaits any serious student. After ten years, the Academy has prepared a venerable number of serious, career-minded music students for professional life, without compromising its belief that a modest student population most effectively enables an intimate learning atmosphere.

To help commemorate its ten-year anniversary, some of the school's most accomplished alumni have enthusiastically taken this opportunity to describe how important a role the school and its staff have played in their musical and professional development. So, from a few continents and a couple of hemispheres, Happy Tenth Anniversary, LA Music Academy!

Everything I've done in my career has in some way integrated all of my training at the LA Music Academy. It was a really key point in my preparation for singing professionally. The school especially helped my performance skills and vocal technique, as well as my ability to deal with vocal problems on the road. Also, the workload there is very realistic; the pace and the stress level of classes are very similar to working in the real world. The Academy prepared me for everything I've done since; in fact I even got a job through a contact I made with a professor. Actually, I got two great contacts there, and both of them basically led to my two first jobs. I was in a studio recording class that John JR Robinson taught, and out of that I was able to perform with him and his band at the NAMM Show, and also the Baked Potato. Then Mike Shapiro connected me with Sergio Mendes, and I auditioned for his band. I got the job, and that was my first tour, thanks to Mike and also Kevyn Lettau (Vocal Department Chair), who used to sing with Sergio. On his latest album called Timeless, the one he did with will.i.am., I'm singing on a song called "Yes Yes Y'all," and I sing background on 6 other songs. Mike Shapiro plays drums on the album.

In the world of professional music, each job kind of connects you to a whole new network of people, and that process led to me going on tour with Ricky Martin, which was just an amazing experience. I was fortunate enough to tour with him for about 9 months. First, it was in-the-studio experience — I sang on 3 songs on his album — then I got to do the promo stuff with him, and so we went to Europe, and we did all Latin America and it was just, I don't even know where to begin describing how much I learned. It was just amazing. Ricky is one of the most unbelievable performers. He gives his whole on stage, and I was just learning from the master, learning from a real pro.

Right now I'm in the studio, writing and recording my own album, and I've started performing the material around Los Angeles. As the production comes together, it's amazing to discover how much my music is influenced by my teachers. I can hear them in there, the techniques and philosophies they taught me, and it makes me really happy that I carry them with me!

What was most appealing about my whole experience at the LA Music Academy was how diverse the curriculum is, and how I was made to learn all kinds of different types of music, like jazz, R&B, and Brazilian; we even learned classical exercises in our technique classes, and I think that just opened my eyes and ears to a lot of new worlds. I mean, I got the Sergio gig, and if it hadn't been for the Brazilian class we had, I wouldn't have been able to pull it off.

I'm pretty much doing what I always wanted to do, which is play on a professional level with big artists, big names. I started touring with Macy Gray about eight months ago, while I was still a student at the LA Music Academy. I actually got an audition through the MD, Cassandra O'Neal, who I knew from playing every Sunday in service with her. It was cool, because on the tour, we'd leave for a few days or a week, and then come back, so I was able to go out, come back, play catch-up at school, and try and stay on top of my game, you know? It was a really good touring schedule to have while being a student. My teachers were really helpful and supportive, and I was able to graduate while touring with Macy.

All the professors at the Academy have a place in my heart, you know, because they each provided a certain element for me. Ralph Humphrey would seriously encourage me every time I got finished playing and put me down when I needed it, you know? Joe Porcaro was always encouraging. He'd always build me up in the styles I felt less proficient in. Tony Inzalaco stood out to me greatly. Aaron Serfaty would beat me in the head about being off-point with my Afro-Cuban stuff, but he'd always build me up. David Pozzi always encouraged me to make sure I know what my theory is. He would keep me on top of that. The teachers who affected me the most, who I had the best relationships with were Ralph, Matt Starr, Mike Shapiro and Mike Packer. Mike [Packer] beat me up every morning in sight-reading.

Before I came to the LA Music Academy, I couldn't sight-read a lick, you know? When I started at the school, just reading snare drum parts was new to me because I played by ear all my life. At the Academy, I kind of learned to see the charts and hear where the hits are, and make the connection of what's going on. It's really helped my ability to play different styles, different time signatures — odd meters, stuff like that — a lot better than I ever could before. And now, I play in a band called Underground Element, where all of our stuff is like, odd meter-based, fusiony stuff, and we play in weird time signatures like 15, and 7, and 9.

Also, like in Mike Shapiro's Funk Class, we learned how to count out the bars while listening to a song, instead of just trying to learn a song by ear. Putting that knowledge to good use means counting out bars, picking out the song — just start listening to it, and try to get it on the first try. That actually helped me out when I auditioned for Macy Gray's band. It helped me out a lot, because in my second audition, the callback, I had to listen to a song for the first time and play it back for them. I listened to the song, counted out the bars, and pretty much got the form down, and then played it back for them with no problem. I had a recent audition for "The High School Musical," a Disney Production composed by Rickey Minor, and Mike's bar-counting lesson helped me out a lot in that situation, too.

I'll never forget my first class with Frank Gambale. It was like, everything I studied hard in my whole life, the guy reviewed in one day. Just like that! With time, he became a very influential person in my life, and he made one of the biggest impressions I'll ever have. An important thing he once told me was, "There is no such thing as luck; you succeed when opportunity meets preparation." And that's a big time truth I'll always owe to Frank Gambale. Bill Fowler and Jeff Richman were also great men to be around. I learned a lot from them, too. And then there was Mike Shapiro. It's the weirdest thing: I actually learned from him how to enjoy Brazilian music here in the U.S.! In Brazil, I stood out as a good funk, rock and blues guitarist, because a lot of people would play Brazilian stuff but didn't have the American language, which I nailed when I was first in the States in the early nineties. So Mike kind of brought me back to my roots, if you will. How ironic! A musician from Brazil learns how to appreciate Brazilian music once he goes to the States! And later, I wound up working with a lot of my Brazilian favorites, like Dori Caymmi, Oscar Castro Nevez, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim… Plenty of Brazilian royalty, if you will. Some of them turned out to be projects that Mike Shapiro was in, which kind of brought my experience with him full circle.

Thanks to the LA Music Academy, I was able to grasp a language that I did not dominate until I came over here. Back home in Brazil, I worked a lot as a guitar player, but not at the same level as Los Angeles requires. Here, being good is just the beginning; you've got to be way better than good if you want to stay busy. Since I graduated, I've been working in Los Angeles for the last seven years as a freelance producer, engineer, and guitar player — you know, basically anything interesting I can get my hands on. I've worked with a lot of people, ranging from Glen Hughes to The Yellowjackets; I played guitar with the Outlawz and Peter Erskine in the same week… It goes through a very wide and cool range. One of my favorite gigs ever happened in 2003, when I received a call from Steve Vai to do a record with Eddie Kramer, who is like one of my all time idols, for an artist named Eric Sardinas. We spent three months at Steve Vai's studio doing a record. It was just awesome! Most recently, I just finished producing six songs for a band called Know over the past eight weeks at Westlake Studios. Before that I was working on an album by an artist named Nick Ashton, whose first album was produced by Max Bennett. In December, I am doing a live DVD for the Flamenco group Mojacar, as well as a CD with Eliza Taylor and Sandro Albert.

The main thing that drew me to the LA Music Academy was the fact that it covers all the information — theory and technique, and so forth — you would expect from a music school, but it's also really based on performing experience, more than any other school I know of. The situations you're put in at the Academy are so difficult, but they give you the ability to deal with similar experiences in the real world, which are then less stressful because you've already been through so much in your training at the Academy. It's such an intense year, especially in the beginning… I remember being in my first jazz ensemble class, trying to play some standard I'd never heard before. I was struggling in front of not only an entire classroom of peers, but also the teacher, whose unbelievable musicianship was totally intimidating, not to mention I'm playing in front of — with, actually — the professional players who play in the ensembles. But when you get done doing things like that as a student, you feel like it was stressful enough that you are now able to deal with situations in the professional world. A lot of the pressure moments at the Academy are a lot more difficult than things you are going to deal with as a professional musician, especially if you're playing pop or rock music. I mean, it's not too often that you're called in and have a rock chart of chord changes and melody plopped in front of you and commanded to play it on the spot.

There's such a wealth of information coming from the teachers and staff, not only about music, but about being a professional musician and dealing with other musicians, and being able to quickly adapt yourself to different situations on a daily basis and feel confident in new situations. The teacher who probably had the biggest effect on me was Mike Shapiro, and he wasn't even a guitar teacher. It's just amazing how much he knows about the music world and how much he has gone through professionally. He was really, really inspiring. When you hear him explain his ideas on music and then you actually hear him play, it's awe-inspiring.

As far as the guitar department, I really thought that Bill Fowler was a great teacher. For me, I've attempted teaching private lessons every now and then, and I think I'm socially incapable of teaching another human something that I know. Professors like Bill Fowler, Jeff Richman and Frank Gambale are musicians who not only know so much, they're also able to verbalize that knowledge and help you understand what it's about and why it's important. They help you realize why you may need all of this information, even if it's some obscure scale, or pattern, or whatever. They help you feel like each thing is important, and they show you how you can use it.

Having ear training on a daily basis was huge. Actually having to identify things on the spot, without having your hands on a guitar to figure it out, is super important when you're a professional musician. The quicker you are at hearing things, the better off you're going to be in really fast-paced situations. I mean, everything's important — reading, technique, and so on, because otherwise you can't convey these things that you're hearing. But if you're not hearing things to begin with, then you probably need to start over. I think ear training is probably the most important thing you can do.

Right after I graduated from the Academy, I got a chance to audition for this band called The Calling. They were recording an album for RCA Records, and it wasn't finished, so there was still an opportunity to play on a lot of the record and just see where it went. It was something I had never done before, actually, playing with a major label band, going through that whole experience. I got to travel around the world, playing in front of lots of people, and making money doing it. From The Calling, I went directly on to play in a band called Lifehouse, who went right back out on tour after I joined. So this was a little more than three years straight of pretty much constant touring. After the touring cycle was done, I felt like it was sort of time for me to see, just more or less see what I could do as a musician outside of these specific situations where I felt like I was pretty limited to what I could express. And so I decided to just be done with all that for a while and see what I could do creatively.

In that break, I found things to make money, like I played with Kelly Clarkson; I did four or five TV shows with her. Then I went on to play with a really, really cool band called Abandoned Pools. It sort of gave me a chance to still play rock music, but do it in a way that was creative and that I could be free. When I joined, they were sort of starting over, and kind of reinventing their music and taking it to a new place. So I joined and started playing, and we eventually got signed to Universal and made a record in two or three months. It was a really great experience, a really great record; the kind of thing that you're proud to say you were a part of even if it didn't necessarily have mainstream success. I also got involved in a project with the Smashing Pumpkin's drummer, called the Jimmy Chamberlin Complex. The goal with that band was to make just really good, creative music that was based around jazz and fusion that he had grown up listening to, and we all loved playing. But also with aspects of modern music, you know, just a lot of different influences involved; Jimmy really liked Tony Williams' Lifetime stuff, and Alan Holdsworth, Miles, and Coltrane, which was really surprising to hear. So I was sort of juggling the Abandoned Pools project with Jimmy Chamberlin's project for a good 6 months to a year. I was pretty much just focused on doing those two things, which was really what I needed after three straight years of touring in pop/rock bands. So I did that, and after a year and a half or so, I was feeling like I could maybe deal with some touring again, and got calls for an audition.

The touring world can be so hit and miss with the kind of people you're dealing with; whether a record label you might be dealing with is honest, and whether the artist's management company is honest. There's just so much to deal with when you're touring with somebody. The first thing that got me back into being on tour was playing with Gemma Hayes, a sort of indie rock/folk singer from Ireland, who is really cool. I toured with her for a few months in the UK and Ireland. Right now I'm on tour with a girl named Joanna. She's on Geffen Records and we're opening for Nick Lachey. It's a very pop tour, it's very middle of the road, but it's fun. I haven't really done anything like this. I didn't necessarily envision doing this when I was at the Academy, but on the other hand, I was also kind of learning not to be too surprised by any gig I find myself in.

My year at the LA Music Academy was the best, most positive year of my education as far as motivating me and learning discipline. The professors are very thorough, very in-depth in their way of teaching, and are very personal with the students. They really have the best intentions to give the student exactly what he or she needs to go further and further ahead. So I gained the skills to be able to learn music, and develop vocal technique, to be patient and really disciplined, and to go about things in a positive way.

Kevyn Lettau was really great. I remember her saying how important it is to leave the ego outside the door when you enter a classroom as a student, so you can truly be open-minded and able to focus your energy on learning new things. This has meant a lot to me. I understood it in the sense that if you hear this constant voice inside your head saying, "this can't be true, this can't be right," or "I can't do this," always doubting yourself or the lessons, then it takes too much energy. So what Kevyn said was really helpful for me. I've been thinking of it ever since, and it's been a long time since I studied there. And now when I teach, I always use this as a very positive thing. Kevyn was the most important influence for me at the Academy. She showed me how to really care about the craft of singing, to be really thorough, to pay attention, and be really disciplined. She really taught me how to be a pro. After my year at the Academy, I [received] a degree at a music conservatory in Holland. I saw a lot of students there who couldn't quite make it because they didn't have the skills to stay focused. In a big conservatory with 700 students, it can be very confusing, and teachers don't always pay enough attention. You're basically on your own when you're in a big university like that. So Kevyn's philosophies helped me along that path to stay focused and keep my goals ahead of me every day. So that was really helpful, and in my professional career, the way I socialize with people when I do my networking, I always try to be very positive and give the best I can.

I've been teaching something called Complete Vocal Technique, with the well-known Cathrine Sadolin, who has the biggest vocal school in Europe. She asked me if I would like to continue studying with her because she felt I have the right pedagogical skills to teach vocal technique in a very good way. So this has resulted in a lot of work for me, including giving master classes in Holland. I do very interesting vocal coaching for big companies, like Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, for example. It's kind of a hip thing to do here in Denmark these days, sending your employees to take all kinds of courses. They take singing lessons, or lessons in speech — how to articulate in phonetics, and how to stand up in front of other people and give a lecture. I give speech lessons to lots of doctors, who use their voices all the time, and they get hoarse, so I teach them some vocal technique, and they are OK again. I even have some dentists who come to learn the proper technique to talk softly, because they are so close to their clients' ears and they can damage their voices [even] by talking too softly. My clients come to me to learn how to control their voices at their jobs. It's very interesting, and I love it. I've been working for some of the biggest companies in Denmark doing that.

As a singer and songwriter, I have a project called Omaya, with a Bulgarian guy named Sviten. We're signed to a Dutch label, and in June, we had our whole CD released in Holland, which is called Novo. We had a release in 2004 on Café Del Mar, which is a Spanish label, kind of huge here in Europe. We were released on their 25th anniversary CD, and from there, it just moved on. In Germany, we were released on Universal. They seemed to like one particular song I wrote called "We All Do," so that song is on two compilation CDs in Germany. We just played at the Uitmarkt, a very big festival in Amsterdam, which went very well, and we're planning a tour in Portugal in November to do some promotion because our CD is coming out there as well. So we're dealing with quite a few countries here.

The LA Music Academy gave me a scholarship when I was pretty young, and I started there with a lot of building blocks for stuff that the school teaches. The experiences I had there helped solidify a lot of my musical potential; the Academy took my ability and molded it and helped it get better than it was when I first showed up. Before I went there, I was definitely interested in jazz, but I didn't really know where to start with it. At the school, I got into jazz really heavily, both performance and composing. (Drum Instructor) Mike Shapiro was nice enough to do some of my gigs around town with me, and playing with him was a great experience. I was pretty young at the time, and I hadn't really played with any rhythmically proficient drummers on a level like that, so I learned a lot from playing with him. And harmony classes with Frank Gambale were great because they were geared towards guitarists. So from being a guitarist with not such an advanced proficiency in harmony when I first came to the Academy, those classes with Frank really helped that stuff out.

My experiences at the school, especially the music that I was exposed to, inspired me to do things musically that I've ultimately become very involved in since finishing there. My favorite experience as a student was probably at one of the Union Station benefits I played. After the ceremony was done, Marcus Baylor, Jimmy Haslip and Bob Mintzer from the Yellowjackets sat in, and I played a couple tunes with them. That was very, very cool; it was a good way to meet those guys and, especially being so young, it was a great experience playing with them. And I've played with them a bunch of times since then. The LA Music Academy was pretty crucial to my development as a musician, for sure, because of nights like that.

What I'm up to currently is performing all of my original music with my band, The Bryan Baker Quartet, which I formed about two years ago. We recorded an album at Avatar Studios in New York in January (called Aphotic, available at BryanBakerMusic.com). With that band, I played the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Next Generation Jazz Festival, we played the Blue Note, and went to Texas and did a bunch of stuff. I'm planning a US tour for that group. I'm playing a lot of sessions and stuff like that for people in New York, but I'm mainly focusing on getting my music and my thing with my group out there.

I had heard a lot about the LA Music Academy, because I used to teach at a school here in Brazil that has a strong relationship with the Academy through Frank Gambale, who visits occasionally to teach clinics and stuff. At the time I actually enrolled, I was living in Los Angeles with my band Udora, trying to get a record deal. I was interested in improving my technique, my reading, and just my overall playing. Once I became a student at the Academy, I tried to see every class with "teacher eyes," so I could improve my teaching skills as well. I got to talk about music, life and everything with people from all over the world. We had really amazing listening classes that gave us the chance to share our ideas among students who heard things differently.

The school gave me the greatest opportunities I've had so far to learn and get information from great musicians, like Mike Shapiro, who is by far the biggest influence I've had. The way he treats music is just amazing to me. One thing that helped me a lot was the way he taught us to listen to the music and absorb everything in it. There was one day when Mike Shapiro took our whole Groove Class to a studio where he was going to rehearse with the Earth, Wind & Fire All-Stars. We watched the whole practice, and I was amazed by the way those guys can play! It was awesome!

We learned so much playing all kinds of music with the pro players in the Ensemble Workshops. They gave us feedback and taught me to respect whatever style of music I perform and understand that it's not about me; it's about the music. For example, when I started playing the drums, I was more into rock, and I never thought I would be playing metal professionally, but I'm loving it, and the Academy helped by opening my ears, and also giving me better vision of what's happening inside the music I'm playing or listening to. So I'm touring with Sepultura as a member of the band, and I've been doing some important studio work. I just came back from Rio de Janeiro where I recorded two songs for a big pop singer from Brazil called Ana Carolina, and that album is going to be in stores by the holidays. I just played all the drums on (Sepultura guitarist) Andreas Kisser's solo album, which will be released in 2007. I think that every gig offers something new to you, so you'll be learning something from it, and I think that's great! It doesn't matter the style you're playing, as long as you like what you're doing and you're playing with great musicians.

I feel like my primary job is an example of how the LA Music Academy prepares you to do a variety of things. The ability to make a comfortable living, while continuing to make music the central focus of your life, is really challenging if you limit your idea of what that can be to playing and performing. It's just a reality that we confront. Not that I anticipated that happening while I was at the Academy. I went there with the expectation that I would become a better bass player. I'd already been through a really good music program as an undergrad at USC and discovered that a really big university setting like that is so broad in nature. There are so many different intentions at work, in terms of what fields of music to focus on and what musical disciplines are being studied simultaneously, and it makes the entire experience feel kind of unfocused.

If you have a very specific idea in mind, it may or may not find resonance in the university environment. My intention was to be a working bass player who primarily played contemporary pop music, rock, jazz, all that stuff. But the real nitty gritty — the sort of vocational stuff about what it is to actually live that life — wasn't really available to me at USC. That's why, even after having gone through music school already, I still sought more, and the LA Music Academy seemed like a great place. It was small, and it seemed serious. As a student there, the whole experience was really intense. It's a combination of things — you're learning all of this factual material about harmony, and different styles, and rhythm, and how to incorporate that into your playing, and you're practicing all the time, and you know there's that whole dimension of it. We would learn some new bit of harmonic theory, or be analyzing or deconstructing a tune; usually we would play through the tune in order to be able to perceive the emotional impact of this stuff that sounds really complex and dry when you're describing it.

The other thing was just being there. There's something about that school — the size, sure, but I think more importantly the faculty, pro ensemble players and visiting artists — there's something about just being a fly on the wall around them interacting with each other that was really informative for me, as far as learning what being a pro musician was about — not just how to play, but like, the "hang" aspects. It was sort of like witnessing the sub-culture of music because there was no doubt that our teachers were also working as musicians in LA. In essence, one's playing is hugely important, but that's only part of it, personality being the other crucial part of how someone's career works out. I definitely came to understand that at the Academy, and it has had a huge influence on my sense of what's important.

Being at the school really helped define for me the way you become a better musician. As Senior Editor at Bass Player magazine, I consider it my responsibility to sort of manifest that in any way I can. I've been here for four years, and I've gotten to do all kinds of stuff, and it's amazing. I've played every bass, and every amp, and every effect, and talked to all kinds of great bass players. When I was a kid, I read Bass Player, that was like what you did when you played bass, and it was how I learned about this world, who the names where, and who built the basses and the amps. And now fast forward, and here I am, and I have the opportunity to have that impact on someone just like me now, and I never forget that there's some kid whose just picked up this instrument a year ago and is like sleeping with it because he's so into it, and our magazine is sort of his window into the fact that there are other people like him. The education aspect is huge. The fact that, as a writer, I'm able to have some educational control over the articles, over the readers. I don't just sort of execute someone else's vision. I create the vision, and the longer I've been here, the more I get to do that. And there are times when the stuff I learned at the Academy I'm literally kind of parroting. Like for a while now I've been writing this "Learn To Play" monthly column, kind of aimed at beginners. And sometimes I'll realize there's some material I've written in there that I remember from class!

Something I really took from Jerry Watts, Chair of the Bass Department, was this notion of when you play something, don't think about it, but do it deliberately with strength and confidence. Like if you're going to play a bass line, play it energetically, play it with intention, and I guess that applies in all kinds of ways, of course. It's true in words on a page, and it's true on stage at a concert. People are incredibly intuitive about this stuff. They can feel it even if they may not be able to describe why. They can sense your enjoyment level of what they're hearing you play, and it affects how they hear your performance. The LA Music Academy was a big part of me understanding all these different elements of how to be a professional musician.

I don't think there is any better school than the LA Music Academy. Every teacher is so close to you, and everybody knows how you're doing, what level you're at. At first, you feel kind of restricted, I mean there's so much material. But no one needs to be sick about it because in the future, it will be easy. In the beginning, it was kind of hard; there were so many lessons, it was so intense, and you feel like "man, my small head cannot take everything." But eventually, you realize that everything just opens up and gets better. All the teachers are really good at helping you make sense of so much information. A few were exceptional. Jerry Watts was like a friend. We got really close. Hussain Jiffry was a good player, a very nice guy, and he helped me a lot. Jimmy Haslip actually sent me some material just today, some books and video from the Yellowjackets. Ed Lucie really helped me with the jazz. Frank Gambale helped me a lot because I was even taking the guitar lessons. If students have the chance to take lessons on other instruments, they should not leave anything out because it helps. Especially drums — if students have a chance to take drum lessons there, they should be doing it. Especially as a bass player, it helps because you're so close to the drums.

I have been playing with Trilok Gurtu for about two years now. It's a really hard job, but it's fun. If I hadn't been at the LA Music Academy, I don't think I'd be doing this job, Because Trilok's music is a mixture of almost everything. So, for example, since I learned to play Latin feel at the Academy, if you say, "OK, play the Latin part," I know how to play Latin. If you tell me to play something in a rock style, I know what rock is. Of course, Trilok's music is a step ahead, because we're playing a lot of meters in 9, 5, and 7, all this stuff. And from the school, I had the chance to learn to play in these odd meters because in my country we don't have very much of it.

Everything I do is related with what I learned from the LA Music Academy. Everything. I'm working with a young girl called Nneka, who's from Nigeria but based in Germany. She's doing more of a kind of hip hop, because she has a deal with Sony, and I did a lot with her this year, like we're playing Paris and Holland at the end of this month. She's a great singer. I'm actually producing some of her songs on her new album. That's another lesson I got at the Academy, which was really positive, because now I can do it professionally. There's a lot to understand about how a studio works. I'm doing my own album, too. Let's say World Music, a lot of African with a bit of jazz influence. I love jazz, but I don't consider myself a jazz player. We're kind of all-around musicians, somebody who can follow all styles of music but not really specialize in one.

I think the LA Music Academy helps its students to prepare their musical basics, and then continue learning. It's a whole process, a life process that doesn't stop. When you study at a music school, you have to continue studying in order to continue growing, and the Academy gives you the basics to start your career as a musician. I think the main thing about the school is that it really helps you grow musically in whatever direction you choose. When I finished there, I started a music school in San José, Costa Rica, called Innova Music School. We have been working on it since 1999, so it's been a long time now. As an educator, I can't really repeat the lessons I was taught at the Academy, because my school is more for beginners and intermediates. We don't teach at the professional level that the Academy does since there isn't really an industry for professional music in Costa Rica. I developed my own style of teaching to fit the less advanced levels of my students, and I think my education at the Music Academy helped me do that because it helps you learn how to be disciplined. It helps you understand the language of music, so you can achieve success in whatever new situation comes to you. What I studied at the Academy really helped me to build an idea of what would work in Costa Rica. People here like to play salsa, or they like to play romantic ballads, maybe rock, or Latin American rock. The Academy helped me learn all those styles.

My school started really small. The first month we had like thirty students. Now we have around 200 students. Most of them don't finish the whole program. They just like to take some classes, and then they leave the school. We've received about 1000 students over the years. We've grown a lot since we started. Now we are planning to do a children's program for kids as young as two years old. And we are also developing a piano program and violin program. It's a very basic level that we teach. We don't teach professional level. Students come to school once a week for one hour. We actually have a hobby program for kids and for people that have careers. For example, a lawyer that wants to learn how to play drums, or a businessman that really wants to learn how to play guitar, or bass, or sing. So we give them basic music training. There isn't really an industry for professional music in Costa Rica, so most people are not interested in studying at a professional level. Actually, my school is the official pre-LA Music Academy school in Costa Rica. If any of our students do want to keep studying after they finish our program, we try and send them to the Academy.

I really wanted to do both performing and teaching, but right now, my school is more important to me than my live performance career. I decided to do music education instead of live gigs or recording stuff because Costa Rica is a very small country, and the market here is very small also. The music scene is very small, so education is the only way of making a living as a musician, and I love it. I feel very passionate about it. The only way performing musicians can make money is by playing at the tourist hotels, and it's very short money. It doesn't give you enough income to have a family. I got married 4 years ago, and I have a two-year-old son, and I bought a house also.

The professors at the LA Music Academy helped me decide to start a music school. They would talk about having their own businesses, while being connected to the Academy. They actually gave us a business class, and that also helped a lot. I really enjoyed all the professors and classes I studied with, especially Ralph Humphrey, Joe Porcaro, and Tony Inzalaco. They were great. They were amazing for me. I remember how, in the Rock Drumming class, it was hard for me to play the American way of rock and roll, so I had to go to see some live rock concerts. And in the last test for that class, we had to play live with a band, and I actually did pretty well. But it took me a long time, listening to music and going to live shows, to really get the attitude, and the class helped me a lot. That was a great success for me. It was pretty fun because when I really nailed it, the whole class, teacher and students, were so happy with me and everybody was like "Yeah you did it!" And now, as a teacher, I really enjoy it when my students figure out something important.