In addition, I also link to a lot of other useful information. The problem with Twitter is that you can easily miss what people are tweeting about. So, I thought I’d post a weekly run-down of the things I think you should take a look at.

• Disney and Scholastic have teamed up to put together a two-part music appreciation lesson plan focusing on the jazz music in the new Walt Disney Pictures’ movie The Princess And The Frog. This is geared toward grades 4-6. Lesson 1 teaches students about the sounds of New Orleans jazz, its origins, and its influences. Lesson 2 explains the history and essential role of jazz vocalists and how they have both influenced and been influenced by jazz instrumentalists. They are also running a teacher sweepstakes, in which you can win a trip to Disney Jazz Celebration at Lake Buena Vista, FL.
• Oil up to save the music! Through the end of October, Pennzoil and VH1 Save The Music are teaming up on a promotion. During the “Play the Music. Save the Music” promotion, consumers who purchase any Pennzoil oil change from participating installers, can receive up to 46 free music downloads plus up to a $15 service certificate (mail-in offer). Through this unique program, Pennzoil will donate $60,000 to the VH1 Save the Music Foundation. Check out the details.
• Woodwind and Brasswind is running a great giveaway that will appeal to music teachers. You can win a Buffet Crampon Greenline 1193 Prestige Low C Bass Clarinet worth over $9,000. The winner will also receive a $1,000 WW&BW gift card for their school. You can enter this contest here. This giveaway runs through October 31st.
• Woodwind and Brasswind has also teamed up with SmartMusic, the award-winning learning software with the power to transform music learning, to giveaway a bunch of SmartMusic teacher and student subscriptions. The Grand Prize winner will get 1 Annual Teacher Subscription and 20 Annual Student Subscriptions. Ten 1st Prize winners will received an Annual Teacher Subscription. You can find more details and enter this contest here. This contest also runs through October 31st.
• Finally, I need to plug the promotion we’re running this month on gearpipe.org. If you purchase anything from American Musical Supply this month, they’ll set aside 6% of the purchase price, to be donated to fund music education projects in public school classrooms through DonorsChoose.org. For your purchases to quality, please make sure you click through to AMS from a link on gearpipe.org.

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We talk about the state of music education, the strict guidelines TakeLessons private instructor applicants are judged on, and even the role Guitar Hero and American Idol have had on music lesson enrollment.

In the end, Steven leaves me with a great deal of hope, telling me that “even if music (education) is cut, what’s really wonderful about music is that this is not going to stop the level of curiosity and the level of interest that people naturally have in music.”

For more information, please visit TakeLessons.com and Steven’s blog at StevenCox.com.

We all try to make small changes in our lives to be kinder to the earth. As musicians, there are plenty of things we can do within that realm to be environmentally responsible. Here are ten things I came up with. If you have more ideas, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Power Your Tour Bus with Biodiesel OK…you probably don’t have a tour bus. Some musicians who do, like Michael Franti, have taken this step to reduce the carbon footprint related to constant touring. If you’re just a small band driving across the state, you can still make a difference. If the drummer’s car has the best gas mileage (and still fits all of your gear), take that instead of the singer’s gas guzzler.

Write A Song About Mother Earth Jimi Hendrix once said “Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.”

Back in 1971, Marvin Gaye included the song Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) on his “What’s Going On” album. If you’re taken in by the soft melodies of this tune, you might miss the weight of Gaye’s lyrics, including “Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury” and “Radiation under ground and in the sky…Animals and birds who live nearby are dying.” This was nearly 40 years ago.

The Wiley One, a Phoenix band, has just released a song called Go Green. This is another band that powers their tour bus with biodiesel. A great example of living what you preach. You can download Go Green at the iTunes Store. Here’s a great list of other songs written about the environment.

Just Say No To Aqua-Net If you’re primping for your Friday night gig in your ‘80s cover band (or perhaps you’re still stuck in the ‘80s!), please lay off the aerosol can. I know you need your bangs to stand at attention through the third encore, but chances are some Dippity-do will keep your hair reaching for the stars, and do less damage to the ozone.

Know Your Wood You might have your heart set on that guitar made from a 1,000 year old, endangered tree, but do you really need it? Will your cover of Blackbird sound that much better? Thanks to Greenpeace’s Music Wood Campaign, top guitar makers like Taylor and Martin are now using sustainable woods to build some of their guitar models. Check out my post at GearPipe.com to learn more about guitars built with sustainable woods.

Make Your Shows Zero-Waste Events Your set list is usually the only thing you have control over at a show, but try talking the venue into serving drinks in cups made of PLA, or another compostable material. Set up recycling stations for bottles and cans. My friends own a company in Colorado called Zero Hero. They are brought into large events and do just this. By utilizing compostable materials such as PLA, Sugar Cane or “Bagasse”, and Potato Starch Flatware, they are able to compost or recycle greater than 90% of all waste produced in an event.

Buy Biodegradable Accessories If you’re a guitarist, you probably lose at least one guitar pick per week. They may be small, but this adds up to a lot of waste. A heavy hitting drummer will turn a pair of wooden drumsticks into splinters in the same amount of time. Wheatware is a relatively new company that makes guitar picks and drum sticks out of a biodegradable wheat-based product. So, if a pick falls through that hole in your pocket while you’re out on a hike, you’ll know that someday it will return to the earth!

Build Your Instruments from Found Objects As musicians, we like to tout our creativity, right? Do we really need to rely on big corporations to cut down a tree and use a barrel of oil to ship the wood and power their factory just so we can have an instrument? A group of fourth and fifth graders at the Applewild School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts needed instruments for a concert. What did they do? They built them out of washboards, pans, pots, PVC piping and plastic water jugs. If you’re looking for your signature tone, what’s more unique than this?

Keep it Digital Remember the longbox? If you’re under 20, you might not, but it was a very wasteful 12” tall cardboard package that CDs came inside back in the 1980s and early 1990s. People raised a fuss because they were totally wasteful and served no real purpose. The people won and the longbox disappeared. Today, with the mp3, bands can take this a step further. If you only distribute your music digitally, there’s no manufacturing of the CD or plastic case, no printing of the booklet, no shipping costs to get the discs from the factory to you. And you get to piss off record labels at the same time. Win/Win!

Adopt an Instrument Face it, we love vintage gear. A quality, well-cared for instrument gets better with age. With a little TLC, even a slightly beat-up piece of gear can be restored to its former glory, saving the environmental costs of manufacturing a new one. Check ebay or craigslist for your perfect pre-owned instrument.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Groupies are irresistible, but you need to use them responsibly. If three groupies follow you back to your hotel after a gig, only invite one or two inside. If you tour through the same town more than once, don’t be wasteful, seek out the same guy/girl you met last time. Finally, your bass player is probably lonely. When it’s finally time to fall asleep, be green and send that groupie down the hall to his room. I know this is a serious subject, but I have to lighten things up once on a while!

For instance, this Colorado teacher is trying to raise $555 to purchase ukulele starter kits for her 3rd to 5th grade students. This classroom is in a Title I school where the students typically cannot afford private music lessons. She has already raised $231 and has just $323 to go.

Or, check out this high-poverty classroom in Texas. This request has come from a pre-K through 3rd grade music teacher who want to purchase rainforest design Remo drums so her students can experience the fun of creating rhythms with their classmates. They only need $72 to fully fund this project.

What can you do to help? This month, there are two ways that we’re raising donations for this charity. First, we’ve partnered with online musical instruments retailer American Musical Supply. If you make an online purchase from AMS during the month of October, 6% of your purchase will be set aside and donated to DonorsChoose. At the end of the month, gearpipe.org readers will get to vote on the projects that we fund with the money we’ve raised. To make sure your gear purchases are tracked, please use the AMS links on this site.

You can also donate directly to DonorsChoose. All month, dozens of websites are competing to raise funds for these projects, so these donations will be tallied for gearpipe.org. Of course, this is a tax-deductible donation and you can choose the classroom project you wish to fund. Keep in mind that DonorsChoose funds all types of classroom projects, not just music-related. So, if your passion is math or science, fund a math or science project. Likewise, if you’d like to fund a project in a school in your town, you can search by city or school. Again, make sure you use our links to ensure that our group gets credit for these donations.

Check back all month and track our progress!

As you know, I have very specific goals here on gearpipe.org. Each month, I pick one music education charity to support. I know there are many deserving charities out there, but I think that I can do more by focusing my energies each month one of specific project.

On my Twitter feed, however, I want to be a directory for all music education news and links. My goal is to make my Twitter feed only about 10% gearpipe.org content, and the rest will be general music education happenings.

If you’re a Twitter novice, you might not be familiar with the hastags system. It’s quite simple. If you want people who are interested in the subject of your tweet to find it, you can tag it with a certain term (like music, tennis, or cooking). In your tweet, that term is an active link, and by clicking it you can see all other tweets using that term.

I was a bit disappointed to find that there was no widespread use of a hashtag for music education. My disappointment then turned to excitement when I realized that I could spearhead the effort to start one. I chose #MusicEd. So, if you’re tweeting anything related to music education, please include #MusicEd somewhere in your tweet so we can all follow you.

I’m excited that after only a few days some people have already begun to use it, including @musicedconsult and @Take_Lessons. To check out all of the posts using the #MusicEd hash tag, you can see them here.

Since you’re all new here, I’ll cover how this website works. Each month, we raise money for one deserving music education charity. Instead of asking you for donations, we also partner up with one musical instruments retailer, who will set aside a percentage of the sales from gearpipe.org readers for donation. Everyone got it?

So, our first music education charity is Little Kids Rock. I first met LKR founder David Wish nearly five years ago when I was working in marketing for Fender. I could tell then that he was very passionate about the issue of shrinking school music budgets and that he also had the business sense to do something about it. Little Kids Rock has grown a lot since, and I’m proud that we’re going to help them grow even more.

Little Kids Rock has dedicated themselves to bringing free musical instruments and music instruction to underserved schools across the country. Ultimately, their goal is to restore music to its rightful place in the academic lives of all kids in our public schools.

They accomplish this goal by:

• Providing weekly music education classes to K-12 students in public schools that have been stripped of their music programs
• Pioneering innovative teaching methods that are rooted in children’s knowledge of popular music forms such as rock, rap, blues, hip-hop and more
• Preparing teachers and volunteers to offer classes utilizing their methods and materials

Musicians Friend has generously offered to be our retail partner for September. 6% of your Musicians Friends purchases will be set aside, then donated to Little Kids Rock. Here’s one very important thing to note: Musicians Friend keeps track of these sales because you’re clicking on the special links on gearpipe.org. If you don’t use one of our links, your sale won’t be counted, and the money will not be donated to Little Kids Rock.

Just in case you need one of these special links, you can use this one.

For more info about our partners, please visit the Little Kids Rock and Musicians Friend websites.

Now through September 4, 2009, for every S’mores Fondue Dessert or Mojito Margarita sold, Houlihan’s will donate $1 up to $30,000 to Save The Music Foundation. You can help raise even more by adding a small donation to the bottom of your receipt. A little goes a long way.

To find a Houlihan’s location near you, download this pdf.

I’ll be honest with you, I can’t think of a better way to do some good. Put me down for two of each!