Frequently asked questions
We offer month-to-month billing with no contracts!
Our monthly membership includes one 45-minute private lesson per week for a flat rate of $215 per month.
There's a one-time registration fee of $39 per student to start your monthly enrollment, and to cancel your membership, we require just seven days notice before the end of the month.
Note: We also have awesome online teachers, and we offer a $20/month discount off current rates for students whose lessons are done exclusively online!
Check out our Pricing Page for more price info.
For new students, your first 45-minute lesson is just $25 with no commitment to sign up for more! One trial per student.
After you attend your first lesson, watch for an email from us with the subject "Thank you for attending!" As long as the spot is still open, that email will have all the info you need to pay your first monthly invoice and reserve your weekly spot.
If you want to reserve a different time than the one you attended for your trial, or the spot you wanted is no longer available, send us a text or an email, and we'll help you reserve your weekly time.
Note: All times available for regular weekly recurring lessons will be shown here: Times Open for Weekly Recurring Sessions
All of our private music lessons are 45 minutes long, held once per week—and yes, your monthly membership keeps the same weekly time and teacher reserved for you!
Our teachers and students love the 45-minute length, since it allows enough time to review past material and practice something new without feeling rushed, but it’s not so long that students can’t stay engaged.
The younger kids like it too, since it allows enough time to do multiple shorter activities in a single session, keeping things interesting and fresh!
We offer both options: In-person lessons at our school in Leander, or online lessons from the comfort of your own home.
When choosing a teacher and time for your trial lesson, be sure to look carefully at the lesson locations! Online lessons will be marked clearly as "Online," while in-person lessons will show the location as "Sense & Color School of Music."
We were in Cedar Park from 2008-2021, so you might recognize our name as one of Cedar Park’s first music schools—but in 2021, we moved to Leander, TX, just northwest of Austin. The Live Music Capitol of the World is in our backyard!
We're minutes from Old Town Leander, off of S. Bagdad Rd between Crystal Falls and Hero Way.
Our school's not large enough for a front office staff, so we're an appointment-only establishment. If you have questions or need help, please reach out in email at staff@senseandcolor.com, or text us at 512-817-3663.
For private lessons, ages 4 to around 110. (Theoretically, of course. We haven’t hit our upper age limit yet.)
Our minimum age to start private music lessons is four years old, but success with children that young depends greatly on how involved the parents are at practice time.
As for adults – at the time of this writing, our student holding the elder record is 82 years young!
(Note: Saxophone lessons are an exception, given the weight of the instrument, so our starting age for new saxophone students is 10-11 years old.)
Most of our lessons are private, one-on-one lessons, in 45-minute timeslots. However, if two family members are taking a class together in the same 45-minute time slot, we offer a 60% discount for the second student!
We also have an audition-only Rock Band group program that rehearses on Friday and Sunday evenings.
Absolutely! There’s no better way to grow as a musician than to perform live, and we encourage it as often as possible.
We host recitals and rock band concerts for students at least 3-4 times a year at a number of live music venues in Cedar Park, Leander, Pflugerville, and Austin. For more details on our upcoming recital, along with a photo gallery of recital photos, check out our recital page.
We allow lessons to be rescheduled online through your Client Profile with at least 24 hours’ notice. Lessons cancelled with less than 24 hours’ notice may not be made up. (We ask for as much notice as possible so our teachers can use that time for other students, but 24 hours is the minimum.)
PLEASE DO NOT SEND RESCHEDULING REQUESTS THROUGH EMAIL OR TEXT. The only way to guarantee that you'll receive a makeup credit is to log in and cancel the lesson on your own in your Client Profile at least 24 hours before lesson time.
If you're not sure how this works, please watch this video:
How to Cancel Lessons & Schedule Makeups
NOTE: Makeup lessons cannot be rescheduled! Makeup spots are limited, and once they’re booked, they’re unavailable to other students—so before you book a makeup lesson, please be sure it’s a time you can attend.
We try not to, but sometimes life happens and we have no choice. Before canceling a lesson, we'll try to arrange a substitute. If that doesn't work, we’ll reach out by email or text. Please be sure that we have multiple contact phone numbers if needed to ensure we can reach you regarding last-minute schedule changes!
If your teacher needs to cancel, we'll offer the option of either a makeup credit, or an invoice credit toward the following month’s bill if makeups are too difficult to arrange.
Log into your Client Profile and look for the section labeled "Credits." They'll be listed there, along with their expiration dates (if applicable). Find the one expiring first and click "Use" on the button under it. Choose a teacher and time, and you're done! For a walkthrough, check out our video on How to Cancel Lessons & Schedule Makeups.
Expiration dates:
Makeup credits from student cancellations will expire after 60 days.
Makeup credits from teacher cancellations won't ever expire as long as you're enrolled in lessons, so if there's no expiration date listed on the credit, that means it's a staff cancellation. If you have other credits with expiration dates, use those first!
If you cancel your monthly membership:
All makeup credits will expire 14 days after your billing ends. For example, if you submit your cancellation request on May 12th, your billing will end on May 31st, and you’ll have until June 13th to get your makeups in before the credits expire.
Students often take vacations in summer, and that’s fine! However, we can’t hold a reserved space in the schedule without the monthly payment, so for vacations, we offer two options:
You can save the missed lessons as makeup credits to be taken later (as long as you give us at least 24 hours’ notice!)
Or you can take the month off from paying, and we’ll fit you back into the schedule where we have availability when you return, at the current lesson rate for new students.
We can’t guarantee any specific day or time when you come back, however, so if you really like your teacher and your lesson time, we recommend keeping your billing going and working in those makeup sessions when you return.
Note: As of October 2023, there is a $29 re-enrollment fee for returning students.
We don't automatically close for school and bank holidays - so if your lessons are on Mondays, for example, don't worry. All students receive the same number of lessons per year, no matter which day of the week their lessons fall on.
Our monthly tuition covers 48 lessons per year. The four weeks not included in the monthly tuition are:
SPRING BREAK WEEK (Leander ISD calendar)
4TH OF JULY WEEK
THANKSGIVING WEEK
CHRISTMAS WEEK
Some of our teachers choose to teach during those weeks, so it’s possible to use them for makeup lessons or additional single lessons. For all other holidays, including Memorial Day, Labor Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, etc, we are open as normal! If your teacher plans to be out those days, you’ll receive notice from us in advance, and we’ll add a makeup credit to your account, which you can use to re-book that lesson on another day.
Depending on where your lessons fall on the calendar, some months will have five lessons, some will have four, and some will have three - but the final total for the year should always be 48.
We’ll follow forecasts on weather.com to determine whether roads are safe enough to conduct lessons at the school. If roads are unsafe, all lessons that day will be done online, using whatever platform the teacher and student). Decisions on any given day will be made and communicated as early as possible.
Note: Local schools being closed on a given day does not mean that we will automatically be closed! Most of our music lessons don’t start until afternoon, so if roads have improved by that time, we may be open.
Since weather is out of our control, we cannot offer makeups or credits to students who choose not to take the online option that day. If a student doesn’t have a good online setup to play at home, it's still worth meeting online to talk about music theory, or to discuss future musical projects or ideas. Even a musical discussion by phone call, or a video recorded by the teacher and sent later, is better than no lesson at all!
You can borrow one of ours for the first lesson or two, but for real progress, you’ll need your own to practice at home. Also consider renting before buying! Rock and Roll Rentals in North Austin on Burnet is a great option. Rent a drum set, guitar, or bass for a month, try it out, and see what feels best! Feel free to wait until after the first lesson if you need advice from your teacher on what to buy or rent.
If you’re doing online lessons, having your own instrument is even more important, so you’ll need your own instrument by at least the second lesson.
Lessons need to be pre-paid, so we require a credit card or bank account on file before lessons can be booked.
Sorry, no cash or checks please.
Each of our teachers has their own preferred online platform, so if you book an online lesson, be sure to watch your text and email boxes for a note from them, and a link to the platform they'll be using! Most of our teachers use Zoom or Google Meet.
Don't forget we offer a $20/month discount off current rates for students whose lessons are done exclusively online. (Note: This discount won't be applied automatically by the system, but once you start recurring weekly online lessons, we'll manually apply the monthly discount going forward. And if you already paid full price for the first month, we'll credit the difference towards your next month!)
At this time we do not offer a discount for multiple family members in separate private lessons. However, if two friends or family members are taking a class together in the same 45-minute time slot, we offer a 60% discount for the second student!
If you’re enrolled in our monthly plan and need to stop lessons, send us an email or text at least seven days before the end of the month, and we’ll stop all future charges. Cancellation requests received fewer than 7 days before the end of the month will take effect at the end of the following month.
Tuition is non-refundable once billed! If you cancel in the middle of a month after paying for that month, you can still use your remaining lessons, or you can request makeup credits to save them for later.
To cancel your enrollment, you MUST notify us by email or text. Canceling your lessons in your Client Profile will not stop billing!
This question is on our online signup form because — well, because we think we’re hilarious.
The answer we’re looking for, of course, is “African or European?” — although we’re pretty impressed that so many of you actually took the time to google it and respond that the actual airspeed velocity is approximately 24 miles per hour, or 11 meters per second.
In case you're still not following us, the joke stems from the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.
Here’s the scene from the movie where the joke is first set up: https://youtu.be/liIlW-ovx0Y
And the scene from the movie where the actual question is asked and the answer given: https://youtu.be/Wpx6XnankZ8
We get a kick out of seeing your answers to that one, so thanks to everyone for playing along!
