Stetson Ridge Music School

My wife discovered Sandy Israel (the owner of Stetson Ridge) on Nextdoor and he has been nothing short of amazing. Our 11-​year old daughter (a total beginner) is now into her 20^th lesson and is fully engaged and learning to play both the guitar and the clarinet.
What is different about Sandy is that he knows many instruments and has countless years of teaching experience. He’s honed his approach and knows how to keep things fun. He has several different instruments in his studio and so our daughter has been able to dabble on the piano, harmonica, alto sax and soon the drums! This diversity has made for a much richer introduction to music and music making. It has also been way more fun. We actually do two 90-​minute lessons per week! We are so grateful we found Sandy. He’s changing our daughter’s life for the better.

Sandy Israel of the Stetson Ridge Music School has left Brooklyn and landed in sunny California. Our loss is your gain. Sandy is a multi-​instrumental tour-​de-​force. He specializes in playing the banjo and also is a marvelous guitarist, but is comfortable with a number of other instruments as well. Being a talented musician does not necessarily make a man a good teacher. That requires totally different skill sets. Sandy has them all in spades. He can teach a beginner from the ground up or much more advanced musicians. Sandy is a cheerful and understanding. Somehow he manages to make the student feel safe to learn new techniques. Since all learning involves building blocks, Sandy has books he wrote himself that support each of the lessons he gives his students. This makes practice at home much easier than it otherwise would be. As a student who was about 60 years old when I started with Sandy, I can attest that it is never too late to take up something new. But, young or old, I hope you will find your way to his school. I recommend him without reservation to anyone who dreams of playing great music.

I’m a 2014 graduate of The Branson School in Ross. Seniors at Branson got to spend the last month of our senior year working on projects, called Capstone Projects, meant to speak to our passions and aspirations, so I chose to write and record an EP album with my band mate, Alex, for our band, Landheads. I knew Sandy from when I had met him at an event early in the school year, and remembered really connecting with the way he spoke about music and sensing his professionalism. So I sent Sandy an email, asking if he would be my project advisor, and he agreed. I remember the first day that I walked into that awesome music building of his and sat down to play him a song I’d written. That day changed the way I define a professional musician, because Sandy showed me what I needed to do if I wanted to sound like one, and challenged me to strive for it with tools that he equipped me with. He proved also to be an unparalleled resource for running incomplete songs past – his taste for composition is impeccable, and the suggestions he made were organic and unbiased to the fact that he is a primarily bluegrass musician. His broad range of taste in general made him an awesome force behind the project. In the making of an album, there’s really no way to go about it if you don’t have someone involved who can say exactly what needs to be said, and that’s what Sandy was for this album – he is certainly a reason for why it wound up as good as it did. If I were to do the project over again, I would have involved Sandy even more. He’s a seriously valuable resource and I would suggest his advisory to any young musician with a similar project; no matter what experience level you think you are at, you will get a lot out of what Sandy has to teach.