14/03/2011

Session Skills

No one really arrived for session skills for some reason. I met Gavin and he gave me work to work on for next week. It is 'sir Duke' by Stevie Wonder.

Music Theory

We had our 1st Theory assessment. It went quite well. I am yet to find out the result. It was harder than i thought it would be. It covered everything we had done over the past month or two. I feel I should have at least a B. The first rhythm recognition question I feel I did quite poorly in. The rest of the exam I feel went ok, with exeption of a few examples but again overall I think the mark will be generally quite high.

Graded Unit

Music Theory took priority over Graded Unit so we didnt have any meetings.

1st Study

We had steve first and we paired up to practice improvisation. In the pair one would play chords while the other practiced they're improvisation. I found it ok, I am interested in chordal improvisation so I was exploring that. Cameron asked us to demonstrate 2 pieces to him just as an update to see how we are doing. I played my piece with Scott. We began with 'all the things you are.' I played reharmonised chords while scott played the solo that was given to us by Cameron earlier. Scott then in the B section played his reharmonised version over mine. It worked quite well though we will need to work on it. We then played 'summertime' which I hadn't played in a while. Still it was fine as I was sight reading and wasn't doing it from memory. Though still a bit of work needed.

DAW

Daw was really fantastic. I made great progress in my piece again so I am pretty much finished with the exception of mastering and perhaps adding a few more melody lines with the cello on Reason. I shall be finishing next week and then I must crack on with my website.

Band

Aidan and I have paired up and we went off to the room with the real upright in it. We didn't make as much progress and we would have liked but we still have a better understanding of the parts we are going to play and we worked out a melody over most of the sections. There are three at the moment. I look forward to playing live with Aidan. We plan to get the electric grand piano on stage with my Fender Twin Reverb. It will a jazz sort of set up. We plan to work on the same piece next week and perhaps start a new one. I have material already so I shall include this in the rehearsal.