#pie school

Congratulations to 2024 Pie School winner Ruby Milner. We look forward to working on your song and spending time with you.

Congratulations to our Pie School 2021 winner Altai !

‘Pie School’ is back

(send us a demo or tell your friend to)

Spend a few days with Pieater recording your music and learning how to release it / navigate the industry!

We’re back (after Covid cancelled the class of 2020) to give an unsigned artist a leg up. Over the past few years Pieater - myself (Tom F), Joanna Syme and Tom Iansek have learnt from the ground up. We’ve had some great fun, learnt from mistakes, and been guided by many generous people in our supportive music industry. We still have plenty to learn, but now it’s our chance to pass on what we can.

Send us your demo (please no released songs) to win two days with Tom Iansek workshopping, recording, mixing and mastering the track at our studio BellBird in Melbourne. Plus business mentoring and release strategy with Jo and Tom F. Some of the other Piepack (Airling, Christopher Port, Slow Dancer, Tom Snowdon, Maple Glider) might be around to help too.

We feel that providing a safe, comfortable and inspiring creative community is important to the success of any artist, and we’d love to share a couple of days with you. We encourage submissions from artists with a diversity of backgrounds and experience.

Email an unreleased demo to [email protected] (these can be rough - a great song can be felt within a rough demo) and we’ll choose one artist/band/producer as the winner.
•Submit ONE song: streamable link to [email protected], tell us a little about yourself too.
•Deadline: Midnight Oct 24, 2021
•Winner Announced: Early November, 2021
•Recording/Mentoring: December 2021, dates flexible. BellBird, Collingwood.
•Pieater unfortunately cannot help out with any travel or accommodation costs for those from out of town.

winner of Pie School ‘18 is Slow Turismo congratulations !

‘Pie School’ is back

Spend a few days with Pieater recording your music and learning how to release it, for free!

We’re back to give an unsigned artist a leg up. Over the past few years Pieater - myself (Tom F), Joanna Syme and Tom Iansek have learnt from the ground up. We've had some great fun, learnt from mistakes, and been guided by many generous people in our supportive music industry. We still have plenty to learn, but now it’s our chance to pass on what we can.

Send us your demo (please no released songs) to win two days with Tom Iansek workshopping, recording, mixing and mastering the track at our studio BellBird in Melbourne. Plus business mentoring and release strategy with Jo and Tom F. Some of the other Piepack (Airling, Christopher Port, Slow Dancer, Tom Snowdon) might be around to help too.

We feel that providing a safe, comfortable and inspiring creative community is important to the success of any artist, and we’d love to share a couple of days with you.

We encourage submissions from artists with a diversity of backgrounds and experience.

Email a demo to [email protected] (these can be rough - a great song can be felt within a rough demo) and we’ll choose one artist/band/producer as the winner. •Submit ONE song: streamable link to [email protected], tell us a little about yourself too. •Deadline: Sunday Oct 28, 2018 •Winner Announced: Early November, 2018 •Recording/Mentoring: December 2018, dates flexible. BellBird Studio, Collingwood •Pieater unfortunately cannot help out with any travel or accommodation costs for those from out of town.

What does it mean to be American as apple pie? Some trace the connection to the legend of Johnny Appleseed, who prepared the West for settlement by planting apple trees wherever he wandered. Some trace it to the apple orchards of colonial America, how apple cider was at one time safer to drink than water, how its edible container of pastry made apple pie a practical choice for schoolchildren and field- workers. Pie is a treat of European origin, brought over by colonialists and adapted to suit the so-called New World. We didn’t invent pie; we invented American pie. “Mom and apple pie ” is slang for “something good and right we can all agree on,” gifted to American English by soldiers during World War II, who supposedly used this as a stock answer for why they went to war. “American as motherhood and apple pie ” was the next—and most audacious—version of the phrase. Staking national claim to motherhood suggests we can make something American simply by saying that it is. My impulse is to complicate the phrase, apply it to things that are less stereotypical, less nationalistic. To make the cliché interesting again is to play with what American and apple pie can be. John Lehndorff, former executive director of the American Pie Council, puts it well: “When you say that something is ‘as American as apple pie,’ what you’re really saying is that the item came to this country from elsewhere and was transformed into a distinctly American experience.” The cliché can signal what it attempts to conceal: there is nothing easy about presuming what American means, then or now. We expect apple pie to be a comfort, not a challenge. It reminds us of a time when all food was homemade, when “just like Grandma used to make ” wasn’t a useful advertising slogan because Grandma actually used to make . . . whatever it was. But the slogan has been used to sell food since the late 1800s—far before our grand- mothers’ time—which means the only thing true about that truism is how much we want to eat food made with love. That’s nostalgia at work, whitewashing the past. Nostalgia’s etymology is homecoming layered with ache. It’s the thing that defines Americana—an attraction to things past, a longing for simpler, better times that may not have ever existed. Apple pie makes nostalgia edible. Therein lies its genius. As a crown relic of Americana, apple pie doesn’t have to be novel to be interesting, which is saying something for a culture obsessed with all things new. While its cultural importance can be generalized by cliché, its culinary importance is sincere: apple pie reminds us that homemade food sustains us in deep, hard-to-describe ways. The time and skill it takes to make a pie shows us that we are cared for. That it’s not about having time, but about making it. Through the rituals of language and dessert, what apple pie was is also what it is: homespun, authentic, and humble, a food that uses the fruits of harvest while symbolizing the agricultural roots of our nation, a sweet that satisfies like a meal, nurturing while it treats. Excerpted from Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour, and Butter by Kate Lebo