For over 100 years, school bands and orchestras have focused almost exclusively on reading music, primarily to enact the will of a composer, through the leadership of a conductor to perform teacher-selected literature at concerts. This, compounded with the predominance of White male composers in band and orchestral literature (with notable progress towards diversity appearing in the past decade) has notably omitted creativity and excluded student decision making. The Sound Before Symbols method is a student-centered instrumental music pedagogy which focuses on using the building blocks of Western tonal music to enable students to learn to make music holistically, using a very simple and enjoyable process that incorporates pedagogical processes of Carl Orff, Zoltán Kodály, and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. The enabling of student decision making decolonizes instrumental music education allowing the student to make decisions as to what cultural styles to portray through music-making, or to develop their own styles.Using the Sound Before Symbols method, students experience music learning holistically and naturally, the way people learn their first language as small children. Students develop skills at rhythm reading, and then learn pitches in a simple and logical way that also reinforces music concepts often not learned until college theory classes. Students engage with elements of music one at a time, always using the aural first, and not using the visual until aural can be done with confidence. By the end of the first year, students will be able to improvise and compose melodies with harmonies, bass lines, and rhythms in various textures with ease, alone and in groups of various sizes. When students later decide to learn to read musical notation, they have already developed the skills to perform confidently, and need only add the skill of reading notation. This workshop allows participants to engage in an accelerated and abbreviated sample of the key steps involved in how the Sound Before Symbols method works.