Tuesday 30th May 2011
All quiet on the western front. What with the bank holiday (yet again) and Liam currently being on tour it’s been quieter than it has been for a while here at Firebird, so do forgive me if this week’s blog is a little thin on the ground. Having got most of our work- load organised for the next couple of weeks without Liam we set about finding venues to actually do the stuff we have planned, this task did and is proving to be hard…we didn’t realise quite how in demand village halls are on a Tuesday but ahh well!
The main feature of our day was drum tuition. As mentioned in our blog on Thursday 19th May, Pete and I went down to Welbourn to test out our skills as drum teachers using Jared Walker as our guinea pig, well the good news is that he thoroughly enjoyed the lesson and asked us back for more. Jared is exactly what you’d want in a pupil; he has a musical ear, listens, observes carefully, picks up on ideas fast and also practices. Having looked at basic three-way co-ordination in the form of the ‘money beat’ (one and three on the bass drum, two and four on the snare with straight quavers on the hi-hat/ride) and progressed a little further than that in the previous lesson we moved onto some new ideas and concepts.
Drum fills, everyone’s favourite thing in the world right? No? Shush, anyway the main focus of our lesson with Jared was that of breaking up a basic four bar form with a single stroke role on the snare drum, like a pro, Jared took to this as if he’d been playing drums his whole life! Is that my friend envy tapping on my shoulder? In all seriousness the progress made is a testament to Jared as a pupil, and his willingness to develop an understanding of the technique we’ve been teaching and also (not to sound inflated) a testament to our teaching method and ability to put across the material.
Wednesday 31st May 2011
A little over a month ago I described our first encounter with the Gamelan, a very enjoyable and informative experience, so it was with great pleasure that we went back up to minster school to do another session with Simon. The session we did in April was very much focused on just having fun and becoming acquainted with the instruments, today however was a different beast entirely a “hard-core Gamelan” as Simon put it.
Much like our first session Simon started by teaching us a traditional Javanese piece on the Sarons, this was combined with some pointers on teaching technique, one of the main points being that singing is a very useful tool to engrain patterns in your head. Once we had all the grasped the piece on the Sarons the group was split between several instruments including the Big Gong, Katuk and Bonang. Again Simon demonstrated another method for teaching, relating the roles of the instruments to writing a sentence; the gong being the capital letter and the Katuk being the commas in the sentence, so on and so forth.
After lunch break we resumed activities, this time focusing on the technique involved in playing individual instruments from the set. We were split up and sent to our instrument of choice and given the chance to ‘mess about’ for a while and experiment. During this time Simon went round the group focusing on each individual in turn, this was the highlight of the day for me as Simon has an expert knowledge when it comes to the Gamelan and expanding one’s knowledge on different forms of music is something I’ve always felt strongly about. Kendhang was my weapon of choice and it took me only a short amount of time to realise that I’m not going to be a great player of the instrument anytime soon! I didn’t get much past replicating four basic sounds; danh, tah, den and tung but as with any instrument you need to get the foundation solid and I'm happy with the progress I made over the course of the afternoon. To round the day up we went around the set and showed each other what we had learnt on our chosen instruments and recapped on the day’s event.
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The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
01522 811229
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