Students from Hayle Academy got early access to an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of more than 5,000 musical instruments available to hire.
ASONE Perform CIC (community interest company) now manages the former Cornwall Music Education Hub. Although the hire service has always been technically available, almost all previous Cornwall instrument hire has been directly via local schools and music teachers.
ASONE is now offering accessibility to this significant collection via its website to encourage more children and adults to pick up and learn to play an instrument. Members of the public to be able to hire almost any musical instrument for up to a year at an affordable cost, while also accessing further music subsidies for qualifying children and families.
Instrument hire only costs between £28 and £50 per school term, with a delivery charge of £15 per instrument to anywhere in Cornwall. Available instruments include strings, such as violins, violas, cellos, and the double bass, woodwind, such as clarinets, oboes, bassoons, and flutes, and brass instruments including trumpets, trombones, cornets, tubas, French horns and euphoniums. Further options include guitars and samba drums, as well as PAs.
There are also skoogs for hire. Skoogs are a new musical instrument designed to empower those unable to play traditional instruments. It is a soft, squeezable cube that connects wirelessly via Bluetooth. Instruments can either be hired individually, or as a group.
Eight schoolchildren from Hayle Academy joined members of the ASONE Hub, and a local four-year-old, Perran, to explore the musical instrument store in Redruth. They were ‘blown away’ by not only the amount of instruments available, but the number of instruments they had never even heard of.
