February 13, 2017

Meet Christopher Vazquez of SoundLife Music Academy

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Vazquez.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Christopher. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I started SoundLife Music Academy with one of my best friends Michael Torres in May of 2013. We are both Berklee College Of Music Alums and have had successful careers as Los Angeles session musicians. I am a guitarist and Mike is a bassist. Over the years we have worked on tour, on television, and in the studio with artists like Selena Gomez, Anthony Evans, Macy Gray, Air Supply, Leona Lewis, JoJo, Kenny Lattimore, and many others.

I always kept a small private practice of students, having started teaching when I was 15 years old. One night after attending an inspiring presentation a light turned on upstairs and I approached Mike about starting a music school together. The idea would be to have real working musicians teach music lessons in the comfort of a student’s home. With this business model, the company could service the entire city of Los Angeles while providing an outlet for musicians to work and give back.

The name SoundLife came up as part of our mission statement to encourage a sound or complete life through music. This means that we want to use music to teach life skills such as discipline, accountability, public address, and much more. To ensure this SoundLife Music Academy only works with musicians who share both a passion and commitment to their quality services. It is imperative that each student feels a personal sense of connectedness from everyone that SoundLife Music Academy works with.

Our service is completely in-home. We send the absolute best university trained performing teachers to students homes on a flexible schedule that works for them. In today’s world of instant access and home delivery, SoundLife Music Academy is the perfect solution for students with busy schedules, children, and adults.

After opening the doors in 2013 we have learned and grown with each passing month. We now offer guitar lessons, bass lessons, piano lessons, voice lessons, drum lessons, trumpet lessons, saxophone lessons, violin lessons, viola lessons and cello lessons. We also hold two annual concerts a year for all of our students and their families. These concerts are filmed and edited into a music video for each student. In 2015 we partnered with the national charity Free Arts to donate a portion of all of our profits to their cause every month.

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?
In the beginning, we were naive. We filed all of the paperwork, built a website, and launched our music school thinking business would just roll in. We didn’t have a clue. Of course, absolutely nothing happened. The biggest challenge for us was learning how to market our services to customers. One year after opening the doors the only growth we saw was from word of mouth. It was at that time that I decided to take some initiative and learn how to properly run a company. I enrolled in a wonderful Marketing Course and began teaching myself about SEO. Once SoundLife Music Academy began to climb in the search results our phones started ringing. As musicians, we never learned about marketing or bookkeeping so it was a steep learning curve as the business grew.

The other challenge was of course scheduling. Many families have to balance sports, arts, and academics along with family time. For us it’s important to make music something to look forward to, so we go above and beyond to make scheduling lessons and changing lesson times as easy as possible. Figuring that out takes time, but we are always challenging ourselves and learning new ways to make the experience better and better.

SoundLife Music Academy – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
SoundLife Music Academy offers private music lessons for the comfort and convenience of home. We are committed to sharing the knowledge gained from years of professional experience in the music industry. Everyone at SoundLife Music Academy is both a performer and teacher, which ensures that our teachers are experienced in all areas of musicianship. All of our teachers have also received a bachelor’s degree or higher in music from an accredited college.

Unlike other music schools in Los Angeles, SoundLife Music Academy promises quality music lessons with a quality personal experience backed by a 100% money-back satisfaction guarantee.

We also offer our students a monthly newsletter with tips, tricks, and stories from the road as well as two annual concerts a year on a full-size stage.

As a company, we are most proud of our students, We often get to see students break out of their shells and come into their own through music and witnessing this process is incredibly rewarding. We have students who are as young as 8 that can play and sing in front of a crowded room of people. As they grow older we see them improve their skills and their confidence and this process brings out their personality. It’s inspiring, humbling, and energizing all at the same time.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
We do two student showcases (recitals) a year for our students and the most recent one was our Holiday Concert in December. Over the last three years, this concert always coincides with the end of the school semester and showcases a student’s work from September on. For this concert the room reached capacity. We represented new instruments and many first time performers. We also saw more advanced and experienced students take the stage. The event was an incredible success and were able to donate the proceeds all to charity. Seeing the room full, and these students doing such an amazing job was probably the proudest moment in my career. I’ve played venues all over the world to crowds as large as 10,000 people, which is what I dreamed of as a kid, but seeing our company doing really good work for our youth and the community, that really makes me proud.

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