I hope you all survived the recent heat wave!

​Keep an eye out on your emails for this month’s student outing with Merijn.

Another reminder that there is now a Whatsapp group for students who wish to jam/play together. If you would like to be added to this or to inquire further, please email bookings@drumad.com

We have sent out a form for students to sign up to our Winter Performance which will take place on Friday the 13th of December. Please email bookings@drumad.com if you have not received this and would like to sign up.

that there will be no band workshop this month and from September we will be introducing a new workshop! This will be a guided practice and pad technique for all you drummers. Please email bookings@drumad.com to book in for this months workshops:

• Thursday the 8th of August - Drumkit and percussion workshop, 8 pm
• Thursday the 15th of August - Junior improvisation workshop, 6 pm
• Thursday the 15th of August - Adult improvisation workshop, 7 pm
• Thursday the 22nd of August - Drumkit and percussion workshop, 8 pm

Please email bookings​@drumad.com to book in for this months workshops:

• Thursday the 11th of July - Junior band workshop, 6 pm
• Thursday the 11th of July - Adult band workshop, 7 pm
• Thursday the 11th of July - Drumkit and percussion workshop, 8 pm
• Thursday the 18th of July - Junior improvisation workshop, 6 pm
• Thursday the 18th of July - Adult improvisation workshop, 7 pm
• Thursday the 25th of July - Junior band workshop, 6 pm
• Thursday the 25th of July - Adult band workshop, 7 pm
• Thursday the 25th of July - Drumkit and percussion workshop, 8 pm

Workshops and Summer performance!

The summer performance is so close! (27th of June, juniors & 28th of June, adults) so make sure you come down to the workshops this month! Email bookings@drumad.com to book.

• 13th of June - Band workshop, 6 pm juniors, 7 pm adults.
• 13th of June - Drumkit and percussion workshop, 8 pm
• 20th of June - Improvisation workshop, 6 pm juniors, 7 pm adults.

If you are not playing in the performance, come down to support fellow students. We will be staying for drinks afterwards on the 28th of June!

shares his experience of his latest studio session at Wax Studios. 

'This is an upcoming debut EP of my good friend Severin Bruhin who is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger from Switzerland. His music is in the realm of jazz/fusion mixed with neo-soul, hip-hop and more. The project features quite a few international session musicians, vocalists and artists including a successful Canadian-born producer Robert Strauss (studio owner).'

You can watch their experience below: 

Summer songwriting course:

​Learn how to write songs and how to arrange music. Small class course (4 to 8 participants) 22nd-26th of July 2019, 10am - 1pm
​Price: £120. Call 020 3417 5793 or email to book today!
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Course aim:​
To produce an E.P.’s worth of original songs (1 song per student). Each student will write lyrics, melodies and rhythms using professional equipment and instruments (including keyboards, guitars, percussion, and more). Students will also consider the arrangement of the song in relation to brand and band identity. Students will evaluate the work of their peers in a positive and supportive atmosphere.

Folks Camps has been providing holidays in beautiful countryside, with friendly people, folk music, dance, song and camping for over 50 years. The camps are centred around a large traditional marquee or a village hall and volunteers organise workshops, day-time activities and evening entertainment.  At the week-long summer camps different teams of campers prepare food each day and everyone eats communally. There’s plenty of time to visit the beach, take a boat trip or visit tourist attractions. Campers bring their own tent, campervan or caravan.

Alain Maurel, the co-founder of Planet Drum visited our camp in the Gower last summer and had this to say:  “Folk Camps residential events are a great place to meet terrific people of all ages and backgrounds and for making great music, as well as dancing and singing. The music teachers are all highly professional and will really motivate you.Give it a try, you won't regret it"

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Workshops and Summer performance!
​
The summer performance is right around the corner (27th of June, juniors & 28th of June, adults) so make sure you come down to the workshops this month! Email bookings@drumad.com to book.

• 9th of May - Band workshop, 6 pm juniors, 7 pm adults
• 9th of May - Drumkit and percussion workshop, 8 pm
• 16th of May - Improvisation workshop, 6 pm juniors, 7 pm adults
• 23rd of May - Band workshop, 6 pm juniors, 7 pm adults.
• 23rd of May - Drumkit and percussion workshop, 8 pm

from a new strand they’ve recently launched called ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’. It’s all about giving arts practitioners time to explore one particular area in-depth. I proposed that I would embark on a year-long project composing new music for four different sized ensembles. The outcome would be four sets of music accompanied by four separate day-long workshop sessions with the musicians, which I would record as a document. Each ensemble would be a different size to the band I’m used to composing for: my quintet, Entropi. So I decided that I would write for a duo, quartet, sextet and dectet. 

 I thought I would be doing project planning for the year, contacting musicians, booking rehearsal rooms and sitting down to compose music for one of these four ensembles. A very organised and logical approach. This is not what happened. In this blog post, I’ll outline what I’ve learnt so far in the hope that it might inspire you to think about how you approach your music-making, composing and improvising.

Up till now, my composing has been ‘on demand’ for a very specific reason. Normally it’s a gig with my band where we need an extra two tunes to have enough original material for the whole gig, or I need to write one more composition for a recording. The process has often been quite stressful and close to the wire. I’d find myself up late trying to finish a tune off for a rehearsal the next day with my band. Fear played a great part in getting the thing done and I didn’t find the process very enjoyable.

so I forced myself to find another way to go about writing music. This has been quite unexpected. A book came into my hands called ‘Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear’, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which talked about nurturing and unblocking creativity. While reading the book I realised that I was quite creatively blocked when it came to composing. You know when you are blocked when you avoid doing the thing - whatever that is, writing a novel, painting or in my case composing and then make up a load of excuses in your mind about why you can’t do it. I realised that I hadn’t really seriously addressed the practice of composition. Often when I did sit down to write, I’d have an inner critical voice saying: ‘what is this piece of rubbish?’ This is no way to get into the zone and be creative!

Improvisers compose in real time all the time. As an alto sax player who is extremely into free improvisation and jazz, I normally have no problem coming up with ideas and essentially making stuff up on the spot. This is just because I have done it a lot, so it feels comfortable for me to do so. A large part of improvising in any kind of music is interaction with the other band members, listening, reacting, developing ideas all in the moment. To be able to do that you need to be far away from the critical mind and right in the flow of ideas. I wanted to be able to recreate this feeling while composing new music.

 Elizabeth Gilbert talks finding our creativity by following what makes us curious. I realised that I wanted to do some visual art. So I proceeded to spend an hour a day doing A5 sized pieces of colourful abstract art. The rules were: do it everyday and be non-judgmental about the outcome. In other words value the process and not the result. This was hugely beneficial for me: because I am not trained in art, I had no real value judgements on my choices of colour, shape or line. I just did it every day for a month. Over the weeks, I started to notice that this art activity was having a positive effect on the way I was improvising on the saxophone. I was applying the freedom I was experiencing on the blank canvas to music. 

As musicians, we spend a lot of time learning and practicing technique. Obviously this is very important, but I feel that we can sometimes forget to engage with the side of music which is artistic. As musicians we are all creative artists, but do we always feel like that? Expressing ourselves through music is probably the reason why we all started playing in the first place. This must be something to nurture as much as achieving technical prowess on the instrument, I think.

using the same system: one hour a day and no judging what ideas come out. It is much harder to ignore the critical mind when shifting the creative process to something we HAVE trained in. But I had developed a non-judgmental muscle through doing the artwork the previous month. When starting a piece of visual art, it was very unhelpful to question ‘why did you use that colour?’ so using that same principle I trained myself to stop questioning every single choice of chord, melody note, bassline, theme and just let the music unfold - much like improvising. Over time, ideas started to flow more freely when I stopped putting so much pressure on myself. I shifted the focus away from outcome towards process. In the month of January I have composed 16 musical ‘sketches’.

My website is: deebyrnemusic.com if you are interested in what projects I’m involved with and where I might be playing next. Thanks for reading this and I hope to share some of these compositions with you in the future!


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Blog post by our Saxophone teacher, Dee Byrne.