About Chilwell Music Rooms

We opened Chilwell Music Rooms in 2011 in a plain brick hall three streets back from Pakington Street, the strip everyone in Geelong West still calls the old high street even though half the shops have turned over twice since. The building had spent thirty years as a scout hall and a badminton club before that, and the estate agent who showed it to us apologised for the ceiling height before we had even asked about it. We took that as a good sign. Marcus had spent his twenties touring pubs and function rooms around Victoria as a session guitarist and had taught out of a spare bedroom in Newtown for two years before deciding the spare bedroom was the actual problem: a fourteen year old learning bar chords needs a room that is not also somebody's laundry.

For the first five years it was two teaching rooms and a lot of scheduling by hand. The piano room came first, fitted out with proper acoustic panelling because the hall's plaster walls threw sound around like a swimming pool. The guitar room came six months later. What changed the shape of the place was the parents who kept asking for two things we could not fit in a converted scout hall: a string ensemble their daughter could actually sit in, and somewhere their son's rock band could rehearse without setting off the smoke alarm. In 2016 we took over the joinery workshop directly behind the hall, a low brick shed with a roller door that the previous tenant had used for cutting timber, and turned it into what the students now call the annex: a drum room, a glass walled vocal booth, a small production suite and a band room with a rug thick enough to kill the reverb off the brick.

Damon joined us in 2014 to build the string program from four beginner violinists into the twelve piece ensemble that rehearses in the hall on Tuesday afternoons, harp and all. Ingrid came across from a Melbourne conservatorium in 2017 and set up the vocal booth the way she wanted it, which took longer than the actual renovation. Reuben, who had spent a decade mixing local bands at a Geelong studio that closed during a lease dispute, took over the production suite in 2019 and built it out from a single laptop and a borrowed interface into the small studio it is now. Anna runs the piano room and coordinates every AMEB entry that leaves this building, and has done so for eleven years without losing a single exam date.

We publish our fees each December for the year ahead, we tell you honestly whether your child is ready for an exam or just ready for another term of scales, and twice a year every student who wants a turn on a real stage gets one at the Verandah Theatre across town, not just the ones who are winning things. We are not trying to be the biggest music school in Geelong. We are trying to be the one where a beginner and a Year 12 AMEB candidate can both find a room, a teacher and a term that actually fits them.