Episode 13 is the first to focus on strings. David Eccles — Orchestra Program Director at The Lovett School in Atlanta, and the man Charlie Menghini hired to run Director of String Music Education at VanderCook in 2008 — comes on to talk to the band-director majority who also teach strings. Plus Steve Smith on the EEi video-submission feature, now in open beta after a successful closed test, with audio feedback and on-screen music attached to every submitted video.
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Inside this episode
The show returns after a two-week break. Charlie opens with Thomas Fuller’s line that the darkest hour comes before the dawn — vaccines are in the news, and the question of the day is which teachers and publishers will come out the other side ahead. Paul says it’ll be the ones who were working while it was happening. Tim says it’ll be the ones strong on the front of the pandemic who’ll still be strong at the end. And music teachers, Charlie says, may be the most resilient and determined group in any school — he points to Cheryl Lavender, Paul’s wife and a 30-year general-music teacher, as the archetype.
Steve Smith brings the headline EEi update: the video-submission feature moved from closed beta (about 7–10 schools using EEi at full tilt) to open beta. Any EEi account can now turn on video, with district privacy controls respected. Better still, the teacher’s review screen pairs the student’s video, the printed music on screen, and the teacher’s own audio feedback in one place — teachers can play, pause, comment, play again, and run a mini-tutorial on the kid’s playing without ever leaving the page. Steve also previews a holiday tutorial on the EEi blog — students record themselves into the holiday tunes and download the results as their own holiday album. “Everyone has a holiday album. Why not the kids?” (Steve briefly invokes NSYNC and Frank Sinatra in the same sentence, which the others gleefully refuse to let him live down.)
Then the main event: David Eccles. The strings-vs.-band ratio David cites is striking — nationwide, roughly two of every three string teachers are non-string-majors. So his ambassador’s pitch is simple: lean into the curriculum, lean on the third of us who are specialists, lean on the colleagues in your building who play (the science teacher who played violin, the math teacher who’s a cello whiz), and lean on your kids who’ve been playing since they were three. He walks through Essential Elements String’s page-18 practice sequence — listen, then left hand, then right hand, then put it together — as the universal scaffolding non-string-majors can rely on. And he closes with the most concrete EEi success story of the season: when COVID-quarantined kids miss a concert recording, David has them play into EEi against the soundtrack, downloads the videos to iMovie, and superimposes them into the rest of the ensemble — “everyone plays together, no tears.”
Read the full transcript
(Note: machine transcript looped briefly around 38:39–39:09, 43:39–45:09, and 51:50–52:38 with short stretches of repeated phrases — conversation resumes immediately on the other side of each gap.)
Welcome back to episode 13
[00:00:00] Standard show open: weekly program for elementary and middle-school band teachers, supported by Hal Leonard.
[00:01:32] Charlie: welcome to episode 13. Today’s guest is David Eccles, Orchestra Program Director at The Lovett School in Atlanta — a guy Charlie hired at VanderCook in 2008, “a brilliant guy and a master teacher.”
Five months in, vaccines in the news
[00:04:21] Charlie: five months into the podcast. The pandemic is worse than ever, but vaccine news is finally cause for hope. Tim: the people working through it now are the ones who’ll come out on the other side ahead.
[00:05:02] Music teachers may be the most resilient and determined group in school. Paul on Cheryl: general-music teacher for 30+ years, the mother hen — don’t get between her and her kids.
[00:06:51] Charlie remembers his own teaching days — teaching kids in the cafeteria while the food was cooking, between a set of doors freezing cold, marching-band season on muddy fields. “Nothing motivates like no alternative.”
What lasts after the pandemic: distance learning, conventions, professional development
[00:09:55] Charlie asks Paul about publishing. Paul: necessity is the mother of invention; Hal Leonard has had to deliver materials in a digital world and on paper at the same time. “When you’re ready, you’re going to have new music.”
[00:09:55] Tim on conventions: they’ll come back — “we’re gregarious creatures, we like to be together” — some people go to conventions and never see a concert or clinic, they just want to be in that climate with their friends.
[00:12:00] Tim: post-pandemic, remote learning will be integrated into normal teaching. You can get Charlie Menghini to talk to a music-ed class in Idaho on demand — we wouldn’t have thought that way before.
Steve Smith: video submissions move from closed to open beta
[00:14:00] Steve: about a month ago we ran a closed beta with 7–10 schools using EEi full-tilt. Feedback came back overwhelmingly positive and spurred more ideas. Now the feature is in open beta — any EEi account can activate video on a per-teacher basis, with district privacy controls respected. Students record video the same way they record audio.
[00:16:39] The teacher review screen turned out better than expected: video of the student, the printed music on screen, and the teacher’s audio feedback all in one view. Teachers can play, pause, comment, play again, and run a mini-tutorial on the kid’s playing without ever leaving the page.
[00:17:27] Tim asks if video works for band music too. Steve: yes — the All Music Studio supports video the same way it supports audio, with rubrics and assignment attachment. Paul clarifies for newer listeners: “all music” means “any music” the teacher uses — repertoire, supplemental etudes, anything.
[00:18:50] Steve on the EEi teacher Facebook group: people fire off questions and other teachers nail the answers before Hal Leonard staff can even respond. “Exactly how we would answer.”
Make a holiday album: the EEi blog tutorial
[00:20:42] Steve: there’s a tutorial on the EEi blog walking students through recording themselves over the EEi holiday tracks (Paul’s Indianapolis session musicians) and downloading the result as a holiday album to send grandma. “Everyone has a holiday album. From Frank Sinatra to NSYNC. Why not these kids?”
[00:21:42] Tim and Paul gleefully refuse to let Steve forget he just said NSYNC on air. Paul: “Shouldn’t it be more of a K-pop band from Korea?” Charlie: “You meant the kid plays NSYNC with the recording, right?”
The administrator’s call: “I want to applaud you for your grit”
[00:22:32] Steve was on a district call working out privacy specifics with administrators so a teacher could use EEi. After everything was sorted, one administrator said: “I want to applaud you for your grit, for your ability to just stick with this. You were going to be sure we could use it, and we found a way.”
Meet David Eccles — The Lovett School, Atlanta
[00:23:45] Charlie introduces David: Director of String Music Education at VanderCook 2008–2019, now Orchestra Program Director at The Lovett School in Atlanta. “Every time I had the opportunity to watch this guy teach, I felt like I was attending a clinic. He gives a master class every single moment.” Also makes a pretty mean craft beer.
[00:24:35] David: “I feel like I’ve been called to Mount Olympus for an audience with the gods.”
The two-thirds problem: non-string-majors teaching strings
[00:25:30] Paul frames the conversation: many band directors also teach strings, and increasingly so. Essential Elements String coexists with the band method inside EEi.
[00:26:30] David: pre-COVID the ratio of string-majors to non-string-majors teaching strings was about 2:1 against the majors. “We lived those numbers every day at VanderCook in string tech.” His ambassador’s message to non-string-major teachers: “We got you. A third of us are here for you to support you.”
[00:27:25] David on Dr. Michael Allen of Essential Elements (his grad-school mentor at Florida State): “Our job as string teachers is to make teaching strings as easy as we can for our non-string-majors.”
[00:28:00] David first opened the red EE String teacher copy in the 90s and it just “hit all those cylinders” — a state-of-the-art response to the great early method books from Jacquelyn Dillon, Merle Isaac, Samuel Applebaum, Mueller Rush. He’s been using EE since first publication.
A book is a book — we teach kids
[00:29:30] David’s mantra: “A book is a book. Books don’t teach kids — we teach kids. We’re responsible for the curriculum, we’re responsible for the technology we bring to our teaching, we’re responsible for finding the most efficient, most comprehensive resource. For me, Essential Elements just does that every time.”
[00:31:30] Don’t shy away from the curriculum. Lean on the third of the population who are specialists — they’re a phone call away. Find them in your district, your building. Bring in the science teacher who played violin, the math teacher who’s a cello whiz. Lean on your kids who’ve been playing since they were two or three years old. “In my levels of assessment, to demonstrate mastery, students have to be able to teach the skill.”
David’s path: 30 years toward being the teacher he was supposed to be
[00:33:33] David is the son of a retired choral music educator — he never wanted to be a music teacher (“long hours, crazy kids, crazy parents”). The day he started a long-term sub at an inner-city middle school in Virginia he knew teaching is what he was supposed to be doing.
[00:34:31] Thirty years trying to be the best teacher he can be — learning from Tim Lautzenheiser, Paul Lavender, and Charlie Menghini about programming, leadership, and what makes good music.
[00:35:21] A line to keep: David says his first five years of teaching were “an absolute horror — in all fairness I should refund the school district the salary for trading me to do that.”
[00:35:40] Coming back to middle and upper school after the collegiate level, post-COVID, David says he feels like a beginning teacher again — thrown into the deep end with no life jacket. “Looking at those kids either in front of me or on the other side of the screen, I’m with you. I’m your person. Nobody and nothing comes between me and my kids.”
Day-to-day at Lovett: 99% face-to-face, 1% hybrid, ready to flip overnight
[00:37:01] Paul: tell us about Lovett. David: suburban Atlanta, independent school, phased back to mostly face-to-face. Voluntary virtual learners stay home; quarantined kids rotate in. “99% face-to-face, 1% hybrid — but ready to go back to virtual overnight if there’s an outbreak.”
[00:39:09] “I’m so fortunate to be at an institution that values the arts and actually puts their money and time where they say their values are.”
The top of page 18: listen, left hand, right hand, put it together
[00:40:39] David walks through the magic of Essential Elements String. “Start with page two and go through to the end — your students will be playing at very high proficiency.” The independent-learner sequence at the top of page 18: listen (train the ear, say and sing the music), then left hand, then right hand (what’s actually making the sound, pizz or arco), then put it together. Repeat the process on every new line.
[00:45:09] David on Bob Gillespie, who wrote the EE String teacher manual: “It’s more than a resource — it’s the Bible. Letters to parents, recruiting letters, playing assessments, listening assessments. For non-string-majors, page by page it’s a goldmine.”
How David uses EEi: from absolute beginners to all-state seniors
[00:46:35] David uses EEi with both his absolute beginners and his all-state high-school kids. With beginners: “Play line 41 through all the accompaniments, send me your best two.” They end up practicing five, six, seven times, choosing best of two. “If I’d told them practice it eight times, they would never do it.”
[00:47:24] With advanced kids: scales, excerpt, and etude come in as video instead of audio so David can give high-quality visual feedback. Students are building electronic portfolios for Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Georgia Tech. A UT Austin recruiter told David: “We want high-performing kids who can do more than just academics.”
The iMovie story: putting quarantined kids back into the concert
[00:49:31] The killer use case for the new EEi video feature: beginners who were distraught earlier this week because they had to go on COVID lockdown and missed the concert recording. David sends them EEi, they play along with the soundtrack with headsets, they upload their videos. He downloads them into iMovie and superimposes them into the rest of the ensemble. “Everyone plays together. They sound great, they look great, no tears. The videos make it into our virtual performance hall.”
Strings and percussion: external technique, visual feedback
[00:51:09] Paul: the video idea is especially right for strings — so much visual teaching has to happen with beginner technique. David: same for percussion. “Fulcrum point on the stick, height of the bounce, hitting the bar in the right place — it’s all visual. String and percussion technique are externally visible. As teachers we observe the same thing.”
Final pitch: explore the resources tab
[00:52:38] David’s parting message: explore EEi. It’s not just soundtracks and recording tracks — PDFs, videos, bowing exercises, setup videos, note-reading sequences, a wealth of Hal Leonard material. “Go to the top, click Resources, just play.”
Lucky 13
[00:53:50] David: lucky to be on the 13th episode — he was born on a Friday the 13th. “Predestined. Meant to be.”
[00:54:14] Charlie: “There’s one master teacher. Hanging out with him is like a master class.” Tim: “If I was a band director I’d pick up the phone and call him. He’d answer. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
Signing off
[00:55:20] Charlie wraps. Thanks to Tim, Paul, Steve, and special guest David Eccles. Tell your friends about the EEi blog at eeiblog.com and the EEi teacher Facebook group. Questions: bandtalkcharlie@gmail.com.
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