Recording Update

So today was another day spent in the Honey Label Studios recording two of our original songs, Summertime and our new song Gone Too Far. This is our second day in the studio and both the songs are nearly finished. It has been a great experience and although we have lost one of our singers, Meg has done and is doing a great job at singing all of the parts. She has had to sort this out in not a lot a lot of time and she has successfully made it sound good.

We also do have a gig today however and for this we have asked another student on the first year of the music performance course, Alice Watson. She has performed with us before at the college christmas gig and so it is easier to get her back than to get some one new in, and seen as though she was 100% up for doing everything she was the obvious choice.

It is also nearly the end of the college year and so soon I shall be moving on to a better place. Most likely a full-time position at Waitrose but at least I will be getting paid.

Talking about Band and Teaching

So at last my teaching is done. I decided to teach  kid from Guthlaxton College in Wigston, I knew the teacher from the school and the kid well so I thought it would just be easier to do it. I taught a basic music theory lesson which he said was very useful and he actually learnt something which shows that I am not as bad a teacher as I thought I was. It took me a long time to upload the videos as I had problems with the file at college and my upload internet speed at home is terrible. It took me 2 hours to upload one video. But I  did it and have linked it in this blog.

In the band we are working towards the end of year college gig on the 8th of June. We have been told that we will only get one song but this is probably not going to happen and we will probablly get more time. But we are prepared for any occasion and so will be ready for anything. We have also got a wedding gig in august, the day before my birthday in fact.

Other events have also happened in the band. We lost one of our singers. This was due to her going to do some stuff in London. We learnt this 2 days before a gig and so we have had to find another singer to fill for her very last-minute. Luckily we managed to get the same person who filled in for her at the christmas gig. The person we have to fill in is a good singer who knows our songs and is up for doing the recording and any gigs last minute.

Teaching Analysis/self review

So yesterday I finally presented my lesson at Wigston Academy to a student there. There has been a lot of problems along the way in setting up a lesson in general, and in the end I just decided to teach a basic music theory lesson. I will put the video up of this as soon as I can, but I have had a lot of problems already in uploading it to youtube and I cant upload it straight to the website so yeah, it will soon be sorted, so here is a screenshot from it, as a start anyway.

Now that the lesson is done I though that I might as well give my opinion on how well I think it went and what happened. It started with some basic introductions, what was going to happen and what I was planning to cover in the lesson. The first subject I covered was time signatures. I went over basic time signatures, their purpose and how to read and understand them. We got through this well and so I moved on breifely to compound time signatures and about them, which he seemed to understand quite well.

After this we moved onto key signatures. This was a slightly more complicated subject and I wasnt sure how well he would pick it up, but he seemed to do alright and understand almost everything I was saying to him. We went over ways to remember the order on the sharps and flats in the cleff and how to work out the key from what sharps are there.

The final thing we covered was some basic chord formulas. This was a difficult topic and I wasnt sure how he would cope but he didnt do too bad. He kept up and seemed to be understanding what I was saying throughout and when I asked him some questions at the end he was able to answer them. Even if he had to think for a minute.

So overall I would class my lesson as a success. The student felt that he learnt something and was able to answer questions I had and understood what he was saying when he answered.