New Students

Welcome to McCants Orchestra! I look forward to meeting each new student and their families every year.

This year, like last year, I have an advanced 6th grade class where I placed 6th graders who have already played for at least one year and a beginning 6th grade class.

I will begin the beginning 6th class by demonstrating the different instruments (Violin, Viola, Cello, and Bass) and explaining how each one works. This will take up the time of the first two classes along with rules, etc. Once your child knows what instrument they want to play, we can figure out how to get them an instrument.

I would recommend that you buy or rent their instrument. Renting is probably the best option since the instrument they start with will most likely be smaller than the instrument they will need in a year or so.

Renting has many benefits. If you rent an instrument, you may include insurance on the instrument. So if anything breaks or is damaged, it will usually cover it. If you rent and don't get the insurance, then you have to pay money anytime anything needs to be done to the instrument for repairs.

Another benefit from renting is an option called "rent to own". This allows a portion of every monthly payment to go towards purchasing the instrument. So after renting for about 3 years, you may own the instrument.

Yet another benefit from renting is when your child out-grows the instrument and needs a bigger one, you can just swap it for a bigger instrument free of charge.

Also when renting, you want to think about the place you rent from in terms of upgrades. In the past few years, I've had many students wanting to upgrade to better instruments after renting their instrument for 2-3 years. Some have rented from stores that didn't have much of a selection to choose from for their upgrade and weren't able to put the money they had "rented to own" towards a decent upgrade. So make sure the store has many upgradeable instruments to try and choose from so when the time comes, you'll have a good selection.

bernhardt

Their are several places I recommend for renting and my top choice being Bernhardt House of Violins. It is located off exit 42 in Greenville. If you need directions just click the link to Bernhardt to see them. My reasons for recommending them are:

They are all string specialist who will work with everyone.

They have more than one string instrument repairmen on staff.

They have lots of instrument accessories and string method books and music to choose from.

Their beginning student instruments are of very high quality.

They have many upgradable instruments higher end string instruments to choose from when the time comes.

I have rental packets from Bernhardt to hand out to anyone that wants one that has all the information about their rental program.

Another store is Draisen Edwards, one of our local music stores.