Monday 15 - Friday 19th August 2011

Monday 15th August

Just over a month ago Simon and I had a meeting at ‘Navigation Care’ in Lincoln, a privately run day centre for adults with learning and mental handicaps with the aim to set up a number of workshops for the customers who use the centre. With a bit of diary jigging, e-mails and phone calls we set up our first music session and today was that day.

After a morning in the office I met up with Gary Hammond at the centre at one and we set about making some music. The session consisted of a show and play session, Gary’s hoard of instruments is now infamous around these parts and he brought just a small selection today to show the participants and let them explore the sounds they make. This format although very simple worked fantastically well and allowed the participants to have a musical experience whilst not having to worry about playing musical parts. Most of the instruments had an interesting visual or movement element bringing and extra level of stimulus to the experience, great for those who were hard of hearing or sensitive to loud noises. The sessions were very relaxed, consisting of around fifteen minutes of music making with a ten minute break then another fifteen minutes etc until three o’clock. Hopefully I’ll be going back solo to do some more work at Navigation, the staff and customers are great as well as the vibe of the place and I’d like to work with special needs in particular some more as it seems the music world passes these people by too often.

Tuesday 16th August

Another episode of ‘Bob the Builder’ was in the making today…yes! Another workshop day at Liam’s, the plan? To build some rain-sticks!

To start off we had a trip up town to buy the necessary ingredients; two poster tubes, nails and some yarn. The construction couldn’t have been easier, we first marked out a spiral of holes down the length of the poster-tube, secondly we pushed nails into these markers, and thirdly we put rice inside the tube and sealed it. Job done. Well, almost, tomorrow we shall take the yarn we bought and help the children at Binbrook wrap the tubes to make them look a bit more exciting than they currently are.

Wednesday 17th August

8 a.m. and possibly our earliest start here at the trust, today was a long day but a very rewarding one. We started our work in Wainfleet at 10 a.m. running a music making session for ‘Action for Young Carers’. Pete and I were particularly nervous about this session as the group consisted of teenagers, a demographic we’ve not yet worked with. All of this nervousness and apprehension however was not needed as the group were great to work with, there were of course points where we stumbled a little, we knew were going to have adjust on the fly to suit the ability and attitude of the group so this was fine. Creative, is the word that summed up this group, rather than dictating the patterns they played the group took a life of its own and came up with some really interesting stuff, the occasional bit of guidance helped steer the boat but all in all we worked with their ideas. The more creative groups although harder to keep control of are on the whole more fun to work with; we’re in the business of creativity so to do anything other than encourage it would be wholly counter-productive.

Our afternoon meant heading south to Sleaford where we had a meeting with staff at two day centres run by North Kesteven District Council (NKDC) for adults with learning and mental handicaps. The first centre we attended was located on North Road and catered for the higher end of the age spectrum; middle-age upwards. The attendees seemed to be in fine fettle, very polite and inquisitive…interested to know what these musical ragamuffins were going to get up to.

The second of the two centres was called the ‘Jubilee Centre’. Located off East Gate a stone’s throw from the famous Cogglesford Mill. This centre catered for the younger end of the spectrum mid-twenties to mid-forties with a couple of gentlemen slightly older than the rest of the group. Again the attendees were most welcoming, polite and inquisitive, Spencer in particular very chatty and friendly.

The meetings went extremely well and resultantly we’re booked in for the next four Thursdays to run music sessions at each of the centres, again the more relationships we can build with organisations the better.

Friday 19th August  

Goodbye Wainfleet. Our last session for A.Y.C. was today and it proved to be one of, if not the best workshop we’ve run to date. The group again consisted of young teenagers, but was a complete contrast to the last group. Focus and timing are the two words that immediately spring to mind and made this the group that we’ve taken the furthest musically. We’ve been told not to go into workshops expecting too much in the way of getting to a developed musical piece, the idea is to facilitate and experience of music making. The result of today’s efforts was a two movement piece complete with break and outro; for the most part the attentiveness and timing of the group, as well as their ability to work as a team were key in allowing us to do this, very commendable indeed.

From a personal development stand-point it felt like all the pieces of puzzle came together today, all of the advice from Liam and Gary’s mentoring being used. Strong leadership, clear direction, steady development of themes and exercises and patience were all put into practice and this can only spell good things for future workshops and our development as community musicians.

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 8th - Thursday 11th August 2011

Monday 8th August

The recurring theme of our office days on a Monday has been web-design/branding. Our task for the half-day was to research and report back on web-designer companies, providing feedback on which we liked and which we didn’t and more importantly why we thought certain web-designers suited us more than others. Not much more to report on that really!

Tuesday 9th August

A couple of months ago I had a conversation with a friend; Amy Briggs who mentioned she worked for an organisation called ‘Action for Young Carers’, we chatted about working with young people and our experiences in this field and sowed the seeds for some cross-organisational work. After many emails and phone calls everything had come to fruition and we were booked for four sessions at the A4YC respite residential stays at Skegness Grammar School in Wainfleet (Lincolnshire).

Today’s session consisted of an hour’s workshop with 21 children from the age range of 7 – 11 years. With it being such a nice we decided to lead the session outdoors in the grounds…big mistake! Although the idea of doing a workshop outside seemed perfectly pleasant the reality was not for a number of reasons.

a)      The wind carried our voices making it very hard to be heard clearly.

b)      It was hard to keep the children in a tight group.

c)       Many distractions…in particular Ladybirds!

d)      The lack of a room and therefore a resonant chamber of sorts meant the quieter instruments were completely lost against the sound of the louder instruments.

As well as being our first session outdoors this was one of the largest groups we’ve lead and this posed a slight amount of intimidation but we worked our best to keep control of the situation. This session also highlighted the need to spend more time on individual exercises and staying on something until the desired result is achieved, it’s this element of time management that does however become second nature over time. Apart from these somewhat negative aspects of the workshops we achieved our main goal in that the children thoroughly enjoyed themselves, as did we.

Wednesday 10th August

We’ve been trying our best to be D.I.Y. gurus over the past two weeks (with some success!), the building session in Binbrook was a success but as mentioned we were having issues with the resonance and volume of the instrument. After looking over the tubing we came to the conclusion that we needed to add more sound holes, so whilst Pete set to work with the power drill I re-glued and re-tightened the frame. The second phase of ‘project xylophone’ was to paint the frame and tubing, in prep for that me and Pete went to acquire some good quality acrylic paints and paint brushes in town. Back at the workshop Pete and I prepped the frame and piping for painting and finished in good time to have a short break before heading to Binbrook.

The painting and music activities running side by side at the activity night proved to be a big success, as you’d expect the boys seeing painting as “too girly” for them to do, so they instead made music with Pete on the junk instruments and provided more than couple of frights via the medium of stray shots from their indoor cricket match! The painting was messy, but hey! What is fun if it’s all clean? The girls did a magnificent job of illuminating the xylophone and got on the task needing only the occasional menial assistance from myself…good to know I’m useful for something haha. It was hard to ignore the sound coming from the music session being led by Pete; the children playing some of the most complex rhythms I’ve heard them play so far, there was also a great flow to Pete’s workshop, bringing in new elements with each exercises and developing in a logical way. Next week we’re going to be doing much the same, although hopefully there’ll be less cleaning up to do afterwards.

Thursday 11th

Another trip across The Fens meant only one thing today, our second workshop at Wainfleet for ‘Action For Young Carers’. With our lesson learnt from our first session we decided to hold our session today indoors. It’s often easy to dwell on the negative aspects of previous experience and admittedly the wayward nature of our last session did rest on the back of our minds, but we were determined to do only what one can do and not make the same mistakes again. The positive attitude paid off for us and the session ran smoothly (almost), the usual folly occurred; children playing instruments when asked not to, volume that Bonham would have been proud of and general  interest in playing anything other than the pattern taught (creativity is always promising to see though).

The group were smaller in number this time round by four, but this made the world of difference in terms of keeping ‘law & order’ and in comparison this group were much more focused and of a higher ability. It’s the variation in abilities and behaviour of groups of the same age that keep the job interesting as it forces us to think on the fly and gives us something to react with; something we encounter all the time as musicians, especially in creative sessions. As ever we had fun and the exercises ran smoothly for the most part, after an hour or so we could that group was waning in energy so we wrapped things up by getting each person to do a small solo and then ended with a big crescendo of noise…very avant garde. 

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 1st - Wedenesday 3rd August 2011

Monday 1st August

Brand new shiny designs for the trusts branding were on the table today for us today and this along with marketing was the dominating theme of our day in the office. As you’ll be able to read on the main Firebird website, Ross Taylor is our resident graphic designer and since joining the trust has been working on logos and designs for our press and promotional materials. With all staff present we looked through and option of designs that Ross had produced for Firebird Flyers to give our opinions on what we liked and what we liked less (there wasn’t anything we didn’t like!). We all agreed that the new designs (some of which you can see below) will bring fresh new image to the organisation and something that will be easily identifiable as ‘The Firebird Trust’.

Tuesday 2nd August

Hack-saws, files and power drills! I know the thought of letting two musicians loose on power tools probably doesn’t do much to ease the mind, but that’s what was on the agenda for today. As part of our contribution to the Liam and Gary’s ‘Pebbles in Ponds’ project in Binbrook we’re building instruments with the children and then learning to play them, our first construction for the project is a ‘drain pipe xylophone’.  The construction process went very smoothly, albeit in the blistering heat of an English summer’s day; by lunch time we had the majority of the frame constructed and marked out ready to place the for the mounts for the piping. After lunch we marked out, drilled and got our pipes mounted onto the frame, excited to hear the end result we grab a couple of different beaters and tried it out…

Even the best made plans can falter and after playing the instrument for the first time it was apparent that there was next to no resonance at all coming from the pipes. This was a big problem, if the instrument didn’t sound good then there was next to no point taking to Binbrook the next day. After experimenting with various methods of mounting we still came to no success and by the end of the day were very worried! To solve problem we arranged an emergency build session the for the next day, using our time over night to think about various ways we could get the resonance we needed.

Wednesday 3rd August

Battle stations! Our morning began with sense of heightened urgency; with three hours to get our xylophone working we busied away and during this time a light bulb went off in Pete’s head! Sound-holes. This seemed to work, and although it didn’t quite have the spectacular we expected but it did improve the resonance in a noticeable way, a work in progress.

A drum session was part of today’s fun and games too. Simon has recently been on a mission lately to get more content in the way of videos and imagery for the web-site and associated domains and rightly so. Pete and I have had the idea for a while to do a drum duet/creative exploration session with two drumset in one room. We’re two very different players stylistically and in terms of our approach to technique and playing, part of our session consisted of sharing ideas and concepts that we both use and it was a valuable learning tool for the both of us. The other half of our session entailed creating a collaborative drum piece and this proved to be a fascinating experience and eye opening experience. Gary once commented that Pete and I gel really well as percussionists, seeming to have an instinct for what the other is going to next and this seemed to be the case today. Using a seven movement’s format we created a piece that explored different grooves and styles, some improvisational and some pre-composed:

-          Movement one: cymbal swells soundscape

-          Movement two: call & response fills

-          Movement three: common time rock groove (unison)

-          Movement four: triplet feel rock groove duet

-          Movement five: jazz shuffle

-          Movement six: tribal duet

-          Movement seven: ritenuto to end

To end our hectic day we met back at Liams and headed up onto the Wold to Binbrook. The instrument building was a big success, the children being thoroughly engaged in the whole process of seeing an instrument come together. On top of that success we had a rather good free-jam with the children, choosing just to ‘make noise’ rather than have a structured lesson per se. It’s surprising and rewarding to hear the development of the kids, whom we’ve been doing workshops with for a couple of months now, some rather nice rhythmic patterns emerging and a lot more initiative and confidence on their part. The session was cut short due to cricket but that’s sometimes the way at Binbrook, we don’t aim to impose rather let children come over and partake as when they feel like. The cricket break gave us some time to have a look at our homemade contraption with Gary and Liam discussing several ways in which we can get some more oomph out of it, something to be tried next week!

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!