Member Challenge: Duets

Every season at Classical Guitar Corner Academy we hold Member Challenges for the whole community and coming up in May is our Duets Member Challenge.

Member Challenges

The Member Challenges at the Academy are an opportunity to focus on one theme for just one month. The narrow timeframe and focus make it easier to set a short-term goal and then work to accomplish that goal. We highlight different themes for each challenge. Every January, for instance, we kick off the new year with our Winter Challenge focused on technique. In this challenge members must choose just one exercise to focus on from a Practice Routine in their Grade for the month of January. Limiting the focus to only one exercise prevents taking on too much and thus makes achieving one’s goal more realistic.

Duets Member Challenge

At other times during the year we host a duets member challenge. In this challenge, the CGC Team chooses one duet from each grade for members to focus on during the month. Members then either select partners or we match up members with partners and get to work learning their duets. This particular challenge can be tricky because there is a technological element to learn in addition to the music. Syncing up two audio tracks and putting video over top of them online across distance is a challenge in itself. It’s always amazing to see how well our members work together, support one another, offer advice and encouragement, and generally work as a community. Each week members post update videos and receive feedback from the CGC Team on how they’re doing.

At the end of every challenge we then get together as a community and hold a live session on Zoom where we celebrate accomplishments, discuss challenges along the way, and talk about how we can take some of the strategies we’ve learned to the practice room beyond the challenge.

As it turns out, we’ll be kicking off our Spring 2022 Member Challenge on May 1 focused once again on duets.

Duet Performances

So we’d like to share with you some of the duets our members have created during some of our Duets Member Challenge. Below you’ll find beginner, intermediate, and advanced duets. These are the final videos our members uploaded at the end of the month.