Middle C Music
Falling in Love With Music All Over Again
I remember walking up the pathway for my job interview at Middle C Music - 30 years old, five years removed from Saffron Falls - on the phone with my mother, telling her that even though it was a music store, I wasn't sure I remembered any of it. So much of my musical life from the past felt far away, untouched in years.
What I didn't know then was that I would spend the next seven and a half years as the General Manager of Middle C Music, D.C.'S only full-service music store. Like the Brass Monkey years before, I eventually earned the freedom - sometimes with tough pushback early on - to reshape the entire store: the design and layout, the products we carried, how everything was displayed. I got to design a musical space built around my experience of being a musician. And by that point in my life, "musician" meant many different things.
I would remember everything I thought I had forgotten:
how to talk guitars and accessories, classical repertoire, digital pianos, drum gear, audio setups - all of it.
What makes a decent guitar sound and play well?
What is actually important when starting building a recording setup?
What digital pianos resemble an acoustic and why?
All the tiny details across every corner of music that I had absorbed through a lifetime without realizing it.
Middle C Music brought it all back. And it let me fall in love with music again.
I could spend an hour needing out over guitars. Or sit with someone trying to figure out how to hook up a piece of gear. Or help a kid and their parent pick their first instrument in a a way that felt unintimidating and welcoming.
Middle C Music became a community music store - full of color, sound, and life - a place that invited you in, encouraged you to explore, to sit down and play. I spent every free moment of the almost eight years I was at Middle C creating that space, and I loved every single second of it.
Being surrounded every day by professional musicians and teachers at the top of their craft was incredible. The blend of so much talent, and so many deeply creative and caring people, was the perfect environment for me. After I moved to D.C., about a mile from the store, I practically lived in Middle C Music.
It was the people that would change me most though. Spending seven and a half years with such incredible coworkers - all artists and teachers - was the most transformative time of my life. Artists are a magical group of humans, and can be endlessly surprising the more you get to know them.
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Who Middle C Music Is
