Today we’d like to introduce you to Deanna And Andrew Wilson.
Hi Deanna and Andrew, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We’re a husband and wife musician team, both have been musicians since our teenage years. We got married very young and over our nearly 28 years of marriage, we’ve always taught and played music at least as a side gig. For the last 18 years it has been our main job!
In 2015 we moved our family to the Central Texas area from Phoenix. At the time, our 4 kids were aged 8-16 and we hoped to bring them to a thriving musical scene as they were pursuing musician life as well. We opened our Texas music school in Cedar Park, partnering with an art studio to bring Wilson School of Strings to a storefront. When Covid shutdowns happened in March of 2020, our studio -which had grown to 180 students and 6 instructors- went fully online- and we kinda liked it! For the next 5 years, we taught the bulk of our students online and continued playing gigs around the area on the weekends. We moved to Liberty Hill from Georgetown in 2023 and just one year ago, we spotted a building for rent that looked just about right for a reboot of our music school!
Tune Up and Jam ATX is our new business name- and we have loved getting to know so many of our neighbours through this musical community! We teach about 50/50 adults and kids and our jam sessions are a huge highlight. Students come to the studio for their lesson or class and then come back later in the week for a jam session. We gather in the main room and play tunes together, all ages and levels of musicians. The camaraderie that is built as guitar players help each other with the chords and fiddle players share bowing tricks and tab sheets- in the jam, everyone is there to play, have fun, and learn while supporting the others. Music is the great uniter. For us, it’s a satisfying feeling to know that we have helped make this possible!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Starting a new business is always challenging! We were lucky to have some students in the area and online already, so they helped us with people in the door right away. But like many small business owners, we have to wear lots of hats! We did all the building design and remodeling ourselves, teach all the lessons and classes, manage the social media and advertising, website and registration, and plenty more. It takes time for the word to spread, so the first few months felt like working for free and sometimes paying to work! But- around the 10 month mark, we finally started to see some growth and the winter months have been our busiest yet.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Andrew plays fiddle for his main instrument (although he also plays guitar, mandolin, cello, ukulele, piano and bass.) Fiddle and violin are the same instrument, but the distinction is mainly in the type of music it’s used for. Over his 40 years of playing, he has won state titles and ranked in the top 10 nationally- but he’s also played with country bands, bluegrass bands, folk, jazz and family bands. He’s recorded on countless albums, taught thousands of students in our studio and at workshops and camps nationally, arranged music for the Phoenix Symphony and currently is creating an entire library of fiddle instruction books, recordings and videos.
Deanna plays piano as her main instrument, although she is most often seen with a guitar, ukulele, or fiddle in the studio or at jams. She grew up on a bus, bandleader to her siblings in the family band. During the years of having her own young kids, Deanna began teaching piano, and then other stringed instruments. It’s unique to have a piano teacher who is also comfortable on multiple stringed instruments, and Deanna’s approach to piano teaching is unusual for that reason. Adults who return to lessons after bad experiences in their childhood are inspired by her teaching approach that has them playing in jam sessions right from the start.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://TuneUpandJamATX.com
- Instagram: @tuneupandjamatx
