Tuesday, March 5, 2013

MBMU 1st music session

Tonight the cast - well most of the cast (we missed you Neil!), of My Bed My Universe met me at my wee Queen Street studio to begin our musical training. Sam (Director), Gary (Writer) and actors Miriama, Max, Dominic, Tuyet, and Wesley.
We started out clapping some subdivisions along to a metronome. Without explaining too much about what they were called at first, we got familiar with clapping crotchets, quavers, quaver triplets and semi-quavers.
Soon I introduced the common note value names using both the "crotchets" and "quarter notes" terminology interchangeably, as well as their counts. We discussed time signatures, and had a crack at playing in 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4, swapping subdivisions, and going up and down the Rhythm Pyramid.
The group did very well indeed! I love working with actors. In general they tend to be very fleet of brain, with excellent kinetic skills - a great combo for getting percussive skills together.
We then moved onto an extremely fun stomping/clapping game from the From Scratch Rhythm Book called Call and Response. I think this will be a regular exercise for us.
After this I armed the guys with sticks and I taught them about rudiments, starting with singles, doubles and paradiddles. We played these along to a metronome pulse, weaving the rudiments into some subdivisions and time signature structures. Again the crew caught on fast.
Two hours went real quick!
Tomorrow will be my first session with NZTrio, and I'm very excited about that too.