Students from 4/4 School of Music — a local recreational music school — will be showcasing their talents this weekend during the school’s first virtual recital.

Performances by 365 students from the Lynnwood-based school — which includes Edmonds School District students — will stream online Saturday, July 18, and Sunday, July 19, and feature singing, piano, violin, guitar, drums, ukulele, viola and flute. According to owner and director Tyler Tullock, the recital will be one of the largest in the country.

“We follow all the other music schools and are part of music school groups with music school owners across the country and we’ve never heard of any this big,“ he said.

The recital will begin at 9 a.m. and end at 9 p.m. both days. The performances will be prerecorded and each last an hour.

Typically, Tullock said the school holds six days of recitals across three weekends in a rented church or concert hall. However, in accordance with COVID-19 guidelines from the public health district, the ceremony will be held streamed online this year. Tullock added it’s not such a bad thing for those students who have families in other places who otherwise would not be able to attend a live concert.

Prerecording performances allows for students to try recording multiple takes to see which one works best, Tullock said It also removes the pressure of performing in front of a crowd, he added.

“There’s actually some real benefits to doing it this way,” he said. “So much so that when the COVID-19 situation is over, we’ll probably go back to doing one live concert series per year and one virtual concert series per year because it’s such a benefit for the students to really show us their very best work.”

The 4/4 School of Music first began in Lynnwood nearly 16 years ago at Band Aid Music — a now-closed music store previously located on 196th Street Southwest. Tullock began teaching weekly guitar lessons in the back of the store. Eventually, the lessons created such a high demand that Tullock had to hire more teachers and branch out.

“I was teaching 80 students a week and I was starting to burn out, so I hired…three or four teachers,” he said. “Then after that, within a couple weeks we were expanding within a few weeks and we hired even more teachers and it’s just grown from that.”

When Band Aid Music went out of business, Tullock opened the first 4/4 School of Music at 2109 196th Street Southwest. Now, the school has 12 locations in three states, including Oregon and Texas. At his Lynnwood location, Tullock said there are around 150 students ranging between 5 to 80 years old.

Tullock said 4/4 School of Music serves students within a seven-mile radius. When the pandemic forced non-essential businesses to close their doors, 4/4 School of Music began teaching students remotely However, since COVID-19, Tullock said the school has seen a 25% drop in enrollment. 

The recital will be broadcast over Facebook Live and can be viewed here. The recordings will be posted to the school’s YouTube page a week after the recital. Viewers will also be able to chat and leave comments during the performances.

The 4/4 School of Music Lynnwood students will be performing on Saturday at 1 p.m., 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. as well as Sunday at noon.

For more information about 4/4 School of Music, visit the school’s website.

–By Cody Sexton