Our Story

Founder, CEO and music teacher – Ross Garrod

Hi, I’m Ross.

I am a music teacher at my core. This means I am determined to help budding musicians fall—and stay—in love with learning music. In 2018, I took a leap of faith from teaching to EdTech because I was seeing first hand an unjust amount of obstacles getting in their way.

The problem was threefold:

  • Students were giving up on learning their instruments because the process often felt more like schoolwork than a fun, captivating activity.
  • Schools were prioritising other departments due to a growing view of music education as ‘optional,’ leaving their music programmes to fade.
  • Parents were valuing other academic subjects like science and maths over music out of a misguided belief that one is better for a child’s development than the other.

These collective missteps had been preventing too many music students from reaching their full potential, right before my eyes. I deeply felt that it was time to shake things up.

I teamed up with Cambridge-educated computer scientist and one-man band James King to see if we could apply technology to these problems in a convenient and user-friendly way. The app-based approach we developed, Practice Pal, transforms how schools, teachers, parents, and students move through music education together.

Practice Pal is an elegant solution to one of the greatest cultural problems of our time: the disappearance of effective, enjoyable, and accessible music education from our schools.

I cannot think of a community better suited to restore music to the heart of our education system than the very people experiencing its countless benefits – from increased academic achievement to improved mental health – every day: musicians.

We are Practice Pal, by musicians for musicians.

Ross Garrod
Founder, CEO & Music teacher

Meet the founder – Ross Garrod