Hi there.
To be honest tonight I was hoping to write about a new open night that I was going to check out - but, having got there to find that absolutely no one was there and the pub wasn't even open, either that or the entrance is very cleverly concealed and everybody was being quiet, I decided to go home again and talk about this.
So for those of you who don't know, I work for Dudley Performing Arts, and one of the events we've been putting on for a number of years is this Pioneer Centre weekend, where we take a load of kids up to the Pioneer Centre and work them up in to musical groups, and have some really good fun while we're doing it. That's very broad and none-descriptive, and due to the sensitive nature of this I'm not going to write about anything specific, but this being my blog I want to talk about the effect it had on me:
I actually got in to playing bass for one of the rehearsal groups. It's strange because in itself it wasn't hard stuff I was playing. What made it slightly tricky for me was that for the first time in a while I had to manage without tab, and just stick to standard notation. I can do it, despite the fact that there was no part written for bass guitar so I either had to follow the cello or, even more worryingly, the left hand piano part, some of which goes quite a long way beneath the range of a 4-string bass. But all these years of reading the rhythm off notation and the notes off tab have made me very lazy and I really had to concentrate to know what had to be played. It's something I need to work on, I think; it's one thing to know where the notes are on the fretboard but I should be able to read it in music as well, especially if I'm mixing with the pros like the DPA guys. Funnily enough it's a skill I seem to have lost over the past 7 or 8 years, mainly through lack of use. I've been slowly getting it back through teaching - but I've still got a long way to go.
I ended up playing drums in a gospel choir as well, that was, how can I put this... interesting. I haven't actually played drums since 2009 since the ill-fated Pip Zest gig, which was so bad that I actually had to be reminded of the name of the band a couple of months later. So yeah, keeping it simple. I mean, it worked, I guess, but I'm not a very confident drummer, so I was making mistakes that I shouldn't really have been making. It's something that I should work on, probably would work on if my drum kit wasn't a complete wreck and I had the money to repair it. But it's an experience I haven't had for a while with musicians I'd not yet had the chance to play with, so it's all worthwhile.
That's what it all meant to me. At the end of the day though, this weekend was about the kids, and from the youngest child we had there right down to the guy who I don't think is actually in school any more, I don't think there's a single person among them who hasn't taken something from that weekend. That sort of thing always makes it worth doing. Looking forward to the next one!
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