Ed Soal Year 13 BTEC Music

Practise Session 1: 4/10/15 Today I decided to work on paradiddles mainly on the hi-hat but nearer to the end I used the rudiment around the kit so that I felt more comfortable with it and felt as though I could execute this rudiment anywhere around the kit possible. At the start I started on a practise pad so that i felt confident with the paradiddle, I did this whilst watching a Drumeo video on youtube which is all about developing speed and control in your paradiddles,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1IQj83NCgI . When I managed to grasp this I went on my kit to test it out on the hi-hat. I decided that what would benefit me the most would be to start very slowly and play along with a metronome at 40 bpm. Once I felt comfortable with the tempo I increased the speed of the metronome by 10 bpm every time until I felt that I had covered most speeds that I would come across when drumming in church and in college. Nearer to the end of my practice I briefly started to experiment ...

Development of Pop Music From the 1950's to the Present Day. Looking back on my presentation I have seen some areas which need improving as well as key areas which I managed to do well in, for example how certain artists influenced society and the culture which surrounded music. In this post I am going to evaluate my presentation and notify to myself the important areas where I fell short and didn't analyse and describe these areas in enough detail, or perhaps didn't research enough to explain them greater when questioned. For example I didn't really expand on genres and how they changed throughout the decades thoroughly enough and I just generalised genres without really talking about all the sub-genres which were influenced from other larger genres. This affected how correct I was and how I was only hovering above the water and wasn't going deeper into the details behind the development of music through the decades. To improve I would give exact detai...

In groups we made charts to place various artists into their decade when they first came into the scene and then what genre they were, we did this to help us with our presentation of development of music. Also it helps with our knowledge of popular music across the decades. I learnt today that Jamiroquai. were in the genre of Acid Jazz, which is . a kind of popular dance music incorporating elements of jazz, funk, soul, and hip hop.  We struggled with Santana as we didn't know whether they were Soul or Rock n' Roll, so we decided to listen to one of their songs. This helped as we came to a joint decision, based on the instruments that were being played and the style in which they were performed, and decided that they were mostly a Rock n' Roll band because of their setup and the style in which they played. As a class we came up with some key musical developments: Relying on live performance, not sales Censorship Guitar effects More electronic Better percussion/equi...

I was part of two performances with two different groups, being the only drummer in the class. The first song was Twist and Shout by The Beatles. In my group we had Steph on vocals, Esme plaed the acoustic guitar with vocals as well. Andy was on lead guitar, Henry was on the piano and I was playing on the drum kit. Our rehearsals weren't very structured and organised due to many reasons. One of these reasons

In this lesson we decided that instead of playing a medley we would create our own song. We did this because we felt more connected to the song. Also WHY It was reasonably easy to come up with the genre and structure of the piece. WHY It wasn't hard to come up with the guitar and drum parts. WHY However coming up with the lyrics are proving to be quite testing. This was because none of us had really had any experience in song writing and what makes good lyrics. So we tried to come up with things that we all liked and were passionate about, we came up with; food, sleep and finding your vibe. We believe this will help motivate us but also make us enjoy performing the song as we feel connected to the meaning. :D This is really helping me as a drummer as it is making me make important decisions on the go. For example the drum beat needs to be good with the guitar parts, but also quite advanced so that the piece doesn't sound boring.  TELL ME MORE, USE TECHNICAL LANGUAGE

In this lesson I got into my BTEC performing group. For the first part of the lesson we were deciding on a song/songs to cover. However in the end we decided, collectively, that we would attempt a medley with popular songs through the decades. Spanning from the 60's all the way to the 2010's. We practised a couple of our choices and managed to structure a way of getting from the end of one song and starting the next smoothly. This project will help with my drumming as I will have to play many different genres, from pop to rock to jazz. It will help develop my drumming skills in genres that I'm not too comfortable with as I will be practising them on a regular basis.