OUR HISTORY

School owner Amy Boyd moved from her sweltering hometown of Houston to Austin in 1991 to attend the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on vocal performance, buying her first home in Cedar Park in 1998. After college, she left music for a few years, working as an online community director for Electronic Arts. Several years later, she returned to music, armed with a resume full of marketing and business experience. It was the perfect recipe for accidentally creating a music school.

In 2008, our first guitar, bass, and voice students took lessons in a spare bedroom in Cedar Park while cats made themselves comfy in guitar cases and parents hung out in the living room. The school was initially called "Guitar Austin"—which in retrospect wasn't a great name since a) guitar wasn't our only instrument, and b) we weren't actually in Austin. Since "Guitar, Bass, Voice, Violin, Piano, and Drums Cedar Park" didn't fit on a guitar pick, the school was renamed Sense & Color, after a lyric from the Grateful Dead song Terrapin Station*.

Over the next two years, word-of-mouth grew, and it became clear we'd need either a separate school or a bigger house. Finally in June 2012, narrowly avoiding the wrath of the HOA, we moved into our first commercial location in the heart of Cedar Park.

When COVID hit in 2020, we kept the music going through Zoom lessons, and rather than continue to pay rent on an unused building, left our Cedar Park location. In 2021, as the world emerged from their homes, we found and purchased our beautiful new forever home in the Parkside Commons complex on S. Bagdad Rd in Leander, TX, next to Robin Bledsoe Park—just a few minutes from Cedar Park and Leander High School in one direction, and Liberty Hill in the other. Goodbye city life, hello hill country!

At Sense & Color, we don’t just want students to play music, but to love music. Our owner and instructors are professional working and gigging musicians who are constantly pushing their own musical horizons, and we work to find the right balance of discipline, fun, and musical inspiration in every lesson.

Our teachers don't just teach. They're also there to listen, encourage, and be an ally for any student that needs one. We aim to inspire our students to express themselves artistically, and to help them become comfortable performing for themselves and with others.

Sense & Color may be just a little local place, but we've been featured twice as the Community Impact newspaper Cedar Park Business of the Month, and we're an active member of the Leander Chamber of Commerce. We’ve also sponsored the Vista Ridge HS Theater Program, the Leander HS Theater Program, and the Henry MS Band, as well as numerous LISD school festivals and community events.

Teachers from Sense & Color have made waves too, moving on over the years to play packed stadiums, international music festivals, and share stages with names like Andrew W. K, Lady Gaga, Jimmy Kimmel, John Popper, and Willie Nelson.

There's nothing that makes us happier than watching kids and adults learn and grow into musicians, and we can't wait to help you start your own musical journey!