Learning Outcome 3

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOUR DREAMCOAT

I am pleased as I have managed to secure myself a place drumming for this years college Christmas musical. Last year, I did the sound for it, and while doing that, I noticed how great it looked to be part of the band. For this reason I quickly volunteered to drum for this years one. I will be given the sheet music soon, and will need to start going through it.

Preparation/Practice

In order to successfully get all the pieces together ready for the shows, we made sure to start practices a couple of months before. We had practices once a week - on Wednesday afternoons after college. We also sometimes did Thursdays instead/as well as Wednesday. I made sure that I could make every single practice (I don't think that I missed one).

At the start I found it quite hard, as I was having to sight read my way through quite complex drum parts in varying time signatures such as 5/4 or 7/8. However, my sight reading soon started improving. I had various ways of practicing in order to get better at the pieces. One way was simply going through the music at home, learning drum patterns and fills, and generally getting to know my way around the drum parts and so on.

Something which I soon got in the habit of doing was taking a pencil to every rehearsal and making notes and annotations on the music. This was key, as there were lots of parts which David decided that we should miss out/play differently/add in and so on. I made sure to annotate everything and write reminders for myself and so on.

In order to get better at some of the pieces, I took them to my drum lessons to run through them with my drum teacher. This also helped to solidify them. He gave me tips on playing the shows and counting, as I was having difficulty concentrating when I had to for example count some large number of bars before the next bit I was playing in. Again, like my sight reading, I started improving a lot!

There were a couple of pieces which I had no music for, so I made sure to go through them and write myself a structure with David, our conductor.

The performances were set to run for five days - Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday with two performances on the Wednesday and two on the Saturday. We set up in the church (the venue) on the Sunday the weekend before. This gave us about two full days of practice of running through the entire show. This was really fun, because at this point, we all mostly knew the music, and it was about having fun playing with the singers and actors for the first time and simply tidying up the performances.

I think that this well organised practice worked well, and we were ready in time for the actual performances.

Here are some photos of me rehearsing with the band in the church. As you can see, I positioned myself so that I had the rhythm section behind me, and so that I was right by our conductor in order to have maximum communication with him.

My positioning by David, our conductor

Me playing and reading from my music

Me enjoying myself!