Stringbabies

Stringbabies Stringbabies is a fun music programme for violin, viola, cello, double bass, and recorder.

Using singing, games, and unique notation, it builds musical skills from the start. Ideal for young children, but great for learners of all ages across the UK. Stringbabies currently covers cello, double bass, recorder, viola & violin and provides general musicianship approach for learners of all ages.

Happy New Academic Year to all my fellow music educators! 🎻🎶As fresh timetables take shape, I want to help teachers who ...
05/09/2026

Happy New Academic Year to all my fellow music educators! 🎻🎶

As fresh timetables take shape, I want to help teachers who are completely new to our community kick off this term with a brand-new approach to early music reading.

If you haven't used Stringbabies or Musicbabies before, our play-based shape notation system makes learning to read music relaxed, rewarding, and fun—especially for young starters, adult beginners, and SEND learners.

Big News for 2026: We now have a full 5-book series available for EVERY instrument in our range! That means 5 progressive books each for Violin, Viola, Cello, Double Bass, and Recorder.

To give new tutors a boost this September, we're opening up 25 Starter Sets at 25% OFF for first-time buyers:

✨ 5 Violin Sets ✨ 5 Viola Sets ✨ 5 Cello Sets ✨ 5 Double Bass Sets ✨ 5 Recorder Sets

What you need to know:

To run the method successfully in your studio, new tutors need both the Teacher’s Workbook and Pupil’s Workbook for their chosen instrument.

Regular Starter Set Price: £33.00 + packing & postage
Your Special 25% Price: £24.75 + packing & postage

How to claim your instrument's starter set: 1️⃣ Send an email to [email protected] 2️⃣ Use the subject line "NEW TEACHER OFFER" 3️⃣ Tell me which instrument set you teach (Violin, Viola, Cello, Bass, or Recorder)

We will process your order manually and ship out your starter set to get you up and running straight away!

Know a colleague who has never tried Stringbabies? Tag them below! 👇

My very first instrument was the recorder, learned in a group at school. Decades ago, that was a shared rite of passage ...
31/08/2026

My very first instrument was the recorder, learned in a group at school. Decades ago, that was a shared rite of passage for so many children in the UK, though sadly it feels far less common in mainstream primary education today.

The story of Musicbabies for Recorder actually began about ten years ago with Anita Felton, a brilliant first-study recorder teacher who trained with me to teach Stringbabies on the cello. She saw the potential for this visual approach on recorder and asked if she could adapt the existing books.

Over two years of painstaking work under my guidance, Anita crafted original compositions and developed a genuinely novel way to introduce beginners to the instrument, testing it thoroughly in her own classroom. A quick look at the first few pages shows our visual, shape-first approach in action.

Now, with the warm backing of some remarkably eminent pedagogues, we are preparing for a relaunch. Our ultimate dream is to help bring group recorder teaching back into the heart of UK schools.

If you teach early-years or primary recorder, what was your own first experience with the instrument? Please do share your thoughts on how we can revive it for the next generation!

I’ve been quiet on here for the past few weeks while taking care of my son, who has been seriously ill. Things are slowl...
28/08/2026

I’ve been quiet on here for the past few weeks while taking care of my son, who has been seriously ill. Things are slowly settling back to normal now, and I’m glad to be back in this space.

Stepping back often brings fresh perspective. For two decades, I assumed that once a student could read conventional notation confidently, the core work of Stringbabies was essentially complete. I could not have been more mistaken!

While working on my MA, I had an epiphany reflecting on Jerome Bruner’s spiral curriculum. I realized Stringbabies was already a living example of spiral learning: basic musicianship distilled to its core, revisited with added complexity over time. The fundamental principles just needed slight refinement for the spiral to continue into advanced stages.

A 17-year-old student of mine recently proved this to me. She is a bright, creative teenager who started learning with me a decade ago. Lately, we hit a wall with her Grade 6 preparation. She had her pieces ready, but she hated practicing scales at home. Lessons became an endlessly repeated cycle while we kicked the exam date down the road.

When I learned she was struggling at school and feeling like a failure, a lightbulb went on. Having been diagnosed with ADHD myself, I recognized the signs. She didn’t need the pressure of rigid deadlines. She needed to reintroduce the creative freedom that drew her to the cello in the first place.

I dropped the exam plans entirely. I asked what music she wanted to play, and her face lit up talking about a video game soundtrack on YouTube. We set to work arranging it together for a cello quartet, using composition and improvisation to carry her seamlessly onto the next turn of her learning spiral.

Without the shadow of a test, learning transformed. As we broke down the piece, we naturally tackled complex 12/8 rhythms and A minor, the exact skills she had avoided in her scales. We are now pairing that project with Bach's Bo***ée and modern adaptations to inspire her to write her own pieces.

Connecting learning directly to a student's interests removes the burden of expectation and lets real progress happen.

Have you ever had to throw out your standard teaching plan to help a student thrive? I'd love to hear your experiences!

25/08/2026

It’s been a little quieter than we had intended in the Stringbabies office.
Chris had an unexpected stay in hospital which was very serious.
Beginning to pick up and back in service soon!

On Mothering Sunday 2025, I had an epiphany while sitting quietly by my bed. Nearing the end of my MA in strings teachin...
03/08/2026

On Mothering Sunday 2025, I had an epiphany while sitting quietly by my bed. Nearing the end of my MA in strings teaching, I found myself reflecting on the previous months of study, and my thoughts turned to Jerome Bruner’s spiral curriculum.

It suddenly struck me that Stringbabies, in its current form, was already a living example of spiral learning. Musicianship had been distilled to its most basic components, and throughout the scheme these core elements were revisited, each time with a little more complexity added.

I thought of how spirals occur in nature, of their elegant mathematical properties, and realised that Stringbabies had been intuitively built on the same principle: learning musicianship, instrumental skills, and composition from the ground up.

For two decades I had assumed that once a learner could read and work confidently with conventional notation, the work of Stringbabies was essentially complete. I could not have been more mistaken. I realised that the core principles needed only slight adaptation and refinement for the spiral to continue well into advanced stages of learning.

This revelation thrilled me then, and it still does. I am now testing these ideas with my current students, using improvisation and composition as the vehicle that carries learners from one turn of the spiral to the next.

All of this will find its place in the book I am writing.

Photo by Thomas Kinto via Unsplash

02/08/2026

Now booking spaces for September!

Learn in the freedom of your own home at at your own pace. Patient and calm teaching thats personalised to you, your tastes and your needs.

For grades or just for fun.

DM me for more info.

Sax, clarinet, flute, recorder, piano, ukulele compostion and theory.

After graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and completing my PGCE at what is now Middlesex University...
30/07/2026

After graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and completing my PGCE at what is now Middlesex University, I began my first teaching post with Surrey Music Service (now Surrey Arts).

As part of my probationary year, I spent half of each week teaching classroom music in a secondary school, where one pupil was widely regarded as extremely difficult to reach.
She was about 14, frequently in and out of foster care, and often rude or disruptive — and this was certainly the case in my classes.

I made my first lessons very practically based. The school was fortunate enough to have a suite of keyboards, and the children worked in twos or threes on short composition tasks I set them.

After a few weeks, this particular pupil began turning up in the music department at lunchtimes, asking if she could work on a keyboard. During that period, my teaching colleagues noticed her behaviour improving significantly.
I considered it a real mark of success when, at the end of the year, she chose to take GCSE Music — much to the head of department’s surprise.

This early experience stayed with me and has shaped the way I approach teaching ever since.

Photo by Amir Doreh on Unsplash

When I was 18, I auditioned unsuccessfully for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It was a traumatic experience th...
27/07/2026

When I was 18, I auditioned unsuccessfully for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It was a traumatic experience that left me in a mild depression for months.

My teacher sent me to Anna Shuttleworth at the Royal College of Music for a consultation lesson. She didn’t mince her words: I was musically talented, but my playing technique simply wasn’t solid.

So I took two years out. I had to learn to play the cello all over again — slowly, carefully, and with the help of an osteopath because I was completely muscle‑bound. With the support of Susan Lowe, I rebuilt my technique and eventually reapplied to Guildhall, this time receiving an unconditional offer.

That experience lit a fire in me. I promised myself that no pupil of mine would ever have to go through what I had.

Over the years I’ve learned that tension in cellists often comes from trying to achieve too much too quickly — especially when left‑hand placing or bowing isn’t secure. So I’ve long taught students to learn a tiny section of a piece very slowly: left‑hand pizzicato first, then bowing exactly as written.

Only during my MA did I discover that this instinctive process has a name: Reduction of Degrees of Freedom, a concept from Nikolai Bernstein’s pioneering work on motor control, later referenced by Susan Hallam.

I didn’t know the theory then — I just followed my instincts, and they worked.

I’d love to hear from other teachers: when have your instincts led you to a breakthrough in your teaching?

Stringbabies is all about encouraging creative musicians and one educator I very admire is the late Sir Ken Robinson. I ...
25/07/2026

Stringbabies is all about encouraging creative musicians and one educator I very admire is the late Sir Ken Robinson.

I first encountered his work online and thought how unusual it was to see a renowned educator arguing so passionately for reform in our schools.
He argued that the current education systems were designed for an industrial era which are no longer appropriate and in the process, the individuality and creativity of children suffer.

To be honest – this is music to my heart and that same philosophy is at the heart of Stringbabies and my work in general.

His TED talk in 2006 entitled ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ is a must to watch if you haven’t already.
In the introduction to his book, 'Creative Schools', he mentioned that it had been seen by an estimated three hundred million people worldwide. His observation ‘I know that’s not as many views as Miley Cyrus gets. But I don’t twerk’ made me laugh out loud..I would have loved to have met him.

I have just started to read ‘Creative Schools’ and already wondering how much of his ideas will influence the book I am writing.

Recently, I was contacted by an adult with ADHD and who was asking to try out the cello. This person had read somewhere ...
23/07/2026

Recently, I was contacted by an adult with ADHD and who was asking to try out the cello.

This person had read somewhere that low resonance frequencies could help regulate the less pleasant symptoms of these conditions.

So I invited her along and let her talk to me about her experiences for a while before trying a cello out. One of the things she said to me was how unusual it was to find someone prepared to listen to her – which rather took me aback.

We then went into trying to play the cello and departing from what I would normally do with a beginner, I showed her how to hold the bow, and we went straight for the lowest sounding string – the ‘C’ string.

Her facial expressions were beautiful – reminding me of a little child awestruck with a wonderful discovery and then a beaming smile. At the end of the session she was visibly moved and said she wanted to carry on.

Without qualification, it was one of the most memorable lessons I have given in recent times – if not ever given.

I was reminded yet again, that music is not just for pleasure, but it carries real power to comfort and heal.

Photo by Quentin Ecrepont (Pexels)

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