Hi Everyone! So my first post was about how "it’s all about who you know." Well, guess what? It’s been proven true yet again! Recently, we have had many great opportunities all because of who we know, and who they know, and who they know and well, you get the idea! It has honestly been amazing to see it all unfold. I’ll just start with some background info...
Eastman Strings is a company that makes instruments primarily used by students. Chances are, if you rented an instrument, or played on one that your school provided – it was an Eastman. Conveniently enough, Deanna (our wonderful mentor) made a connection with John Fulton, manager of sales, at Eastman Strings. Now, early on in Deanna’s career, she was fortunate enough to be sponsored by a company similar to Eastman Strings. They gave her an instrument to perform on and got her many performance opportunities. Having this experience be so beneficial to her career, Deanna thought that Eastman would be a great fit for us. She was kind enough to contact John and invite him to one of our school performances. John attended the concert we gave at the Arizona School for Arts. After our show he told us how impressed he was by our presentation and performance. He invited us to visit the Eastman Strings factory in California. This past weekend we traveled to the factory for a tour of the whole facility AND (drumroll please) to each pick out an instrument for us to take for future performances!
The factory is HUGE!!!!!
They had thousands of instruments in there! Literally thou-sands. It was so insane to see just the sheer amount of stuff they had under one roof! After our tour of the factory was the moment we had been eagerly awaiting. Time to pick out our new instruments!
We were all very impressed by the quality of instruments they gave us to try out. All of them sounded great so it made picking the right one a little difficult – though I won’t lie, that’s a good problem to have! With so many great options, it wasn’t too long before we each found a great fit!
After choosing instruments and a little bit of lunch (mmmmm sushi… let us know if you’re headed toward L.A. we’ll get you the info), it was time for our video shoot with Eastman Strings for their Youtube channel and promotional material. They wanted to film and record us performing so we decided to play our mash-up of Fix You and Clocks by Coldplay.
It was then time for our interview. They asked us a lot of questions that we have never been asked before like, “What was your worst gig ever?” and, “How do you drive traffic to your YouTube and Kickstarter pages?” Of course, there were also the usual questions involving how we met and when we each started on our instruments, but overall it was probably the most unique interview I have experienced up to this point. Luckily, it was a totally comfortable experience and I think we did a great job (at least I’m hoping we did). We should be getting the footage of the performance and interview soon so we will post it when we get it! You be the judge.
Once we were done with that they gave us some cases for our instruments and sent us on our way. Eastman Strings is a class-A organization. Everyone that works there is so helpful, supportive, and polite. In the near future Eastman Strings will be sending us all around the country to give clinics and performances. We seriously can’t wait to get started! We feel so blessed and honored to be a part of the Eastman Strings family. We could not ask for a better sponsor!
And just think, all of this came our way because we knew someone who knew someone. My parting advice, similar to my first post: Build your network people, it will pay off!
