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Owners: Mayron & Colleen Cole
Yrs in Business: 35 years
URL: www.pianomadeeasy.com
Email: mayroncole@mcpiano.com
Phone: 800-527-6873
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What does your company offer? ... The Mayron Cole Music Conservatory, Inc. publishes and markets to schools and private piano studios a group piano teaching method written and illustrated by Mayron Cole. Currently, the company publishes over 270 products, including a seventeen volume piano teaching method, music theory games, teacher manuals, orchestrated accompaniment disks, solos, multi-keyboard ensembles, business manuals, and training videos for group piano instruction. Mayron Cole's newest product is Piano Made Easy ® which premiered March 2006. Piano Made Easy is an educational computer program that is marketed with a high-end small piano keyboard and an instructional, animated computer CD.
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How did your company come to be? ... Mayron began teaching piano in 1969 while her children were small and her husband was finishing his specialty training in orthopedic surgery. It soon became evident to Mayron that teaching one piano student at a time was boring for her and for the student, so she began grouping students according to their ages and abilities and teaching them in small groups. There was little to no appropriate group piano teaching material available at that time, so Mayron began writing her own material. She'd write piano music and theory sheets every morning and teach that material in the afternoons. The students' renewed enthusiasm and lesson preparation for the group classes was awesome.
Her piano studio enrollment grew quickly and had to be moved out of her home. That's when a duplex apartment building was purchased close by, and The Mayron Cole Music Conservatory, Inc. was incorporated. Teachers soon heard of Mayron's highly successful piano method and asked Mayron to sell it to them and to train them to teach it. By 1984, The Mayron Cole Piano Method had acquired a national base. Teacher training seminars were held throughout the country, and more teachers began purchasing their teaching supplies from The Mayron Cole Music Conservatory, Inc. Eventually, Mayron retired from teaching to run the publishing division of her business and to develop new products. In 2001 her husband, Dr. Bill Cole, retired from his practice of orthopedic surgery, and he and Mayron moved the publishing company to her hometown of Gonzales, Tx.
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How did Piano Made Easy ® come to be? ... Mayron's approach to teaching piano has always been built on three basic steps: learn to play/count rhythms correctly; learn the location of the keys on the keyboard; learn to read staff notes. Mayron had long dreamed of creating an animated computer program that would teach beginner pianists the first two steps. In 1990, she wrote the lesson concepts, music and lyrics for Piano Made Easy. But the computer program involved eleven CDs and had inferior graphics. Piano Made Easy was shelved until 2001.
In 2001 Colleen Cole, Mayron and Bill's daughter, returned to Texas from a six-year career in film production in Los Angeles. Mayron was confident that technology had caught up with her computer program vision, so she called Colleen and asked her to direct the renewed Piano Made Easy project. Colleen became a partner on the project and put together a great crew. Award winning graphics artist, Chris Mayes, agreed to do the illustrations; MobiusDV of Houston wrote the program code; and Colleen wrote the script and served as director using Mayron's compositions, lyrics and lesson concepts. It took the team five years to bring Piano Made Easy to life. "It was a labor of love! Piano Made Easy has won many awards in the toy industry, including a Platinum Award from Family Review Center. Piano Made Easy features a zany zookeeper and his dog. These two characters take the player through a beautiful zoo where all the animals have hidden music. After teaching a music concept to the viewer, the viewer is invited to click around on some of the zoo animals and find the hidden music. When the music pops up on the computer screen, the viewer is invited to play along on the small piano keyboard that is included with Piano Made Easy. There are fifty-seven original, orchestrated compositions to learn, plus ten music theory games to play. Our goal is to eventually make Piano Made Easy available for every child in the world! A big goal, but-why not?" says Mayron Cole. "The world would be a better place if everyone played the piano, don't you think?"
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How is your company unique? ...
"I think ours is the only music publishing company that specializes in group piano teaching material. Our company also sells all the other products needed to run a successful group piano studio, so for the group piano teacher, we are the place to shop! But when I first started writing music, my dream was to have one of the large publishing companies contract with me to print and distribute my music and mail me royalty checks. But that is a very difficult goal to achieve, I quickly discovered. So I began selling my music over my website that my husband, Bill, created and still maintains daily. Bill also listed The Mayron Cole Piano Method on major search engines. The search engines are a real key to success! I have found that the web offers an independent company such as mine the chance to succeed. Our company has a large warehouse, shipping area, and an office with workers answering phones, but we do a tremendous amount of business over the web and our 800 phone line. We built our company on fast, competent service! I encourage all entrepreneurs who have a dream to build that dream on the web! We live in a marvelous age today!"
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Tell us about you, your family ...? ... "My husband and I work each day in our publishing business along with our daughter, Colleen, who owns a home nearby. Colleen purchased 20% of my company last year and is now my business partner. Our other daughter, Ellisa, lives in Germany with her husband and three young sons.
"I am currently writing and illustrating a piano method for adult beginners. I hope to have it completed within the next six months and available in bookstores nationwide. I play the piano each Sunday morning for the First Baptist Church in Gonzales, Tx. Bill teaches an adult men's Sunday School class and also plays drums in some local cowboy bands. We love living in a small town with the slower paced lifestyle.
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Family Review Center is pleased to feature The Mayron Cole Music Conservatory, both in the featured company article and in the review center. The Mayron Cole Music Conservatory is a company that is dedicated to inspiring and enabling children in the quest for learning piano.
Stop by and check out their REVIEW and their WEBSITE. You will be so glad you ran across them! ¶
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