Strengths
This year, I think that performing has been my biggest strength. Coming into this course as someone with lots of performing experience, I think the live show we did in project one represents this well as it shows my confidence as a live drummer. The rehearsals helped me improve my group work skills and performing with people we had only known for a month or so meant we had to all trust each other! During this year, I was also asked to rehearse and perform live with the HE music students which was amazing for improving my drumming skills and confidence. The students were a lot older than me but they were really friendly and talented, which helped us all work together during rehearsals and for the final performance. I can improve my performance skills by potentially interacting more with the audience (though this can be difficult as a drummer) as this will make the performance look and feel much more fun and interesting. I would also like to confidently perform live on another instrument like a guitar some time in the future.
I had never composed a full song professionally before (except for my GCSE music ones) so because of this, I am really impressed with the compositions I made during project two! I hadn’t used Logic Pro before and was really excited to experiment with it, and I think the song I managed to produce on it is a great start to say I was learning along the way! I also enjoyed the process of using Logic and making the song, searching up tutorials on how to do things like piano rolls in my spare time. Learning how to use Sibelius has helped me with my music theory skills and I can now read sheet notation a little more fluently, however, I hope to still improve on this as it is far from perfect. Because composing is such a new strength for me, I hope to use these software in the future and learn even more about them.
As well as using software to compose a song, physical songwriting was another strength for me this year. During project three, I and my group made a whole piece of music, using the main elements of a song like melody, rhythm, lyrics and harmony and also other ones such as dynamics and texture. I had never produced a whole song before and it was a shame that we couldn’t be in college to use the recording studio because of the coronavirus pandemic, but I think I adapted really well with producing from home, which is why I think this was such an important strength. I also played the guitar on the song instead of drums; I think this shows my confidence as a multi-instrumentalist. I also put the whole song together and edited it on my laptop using Reaper, which gave me more insight into how recording and producing works.
I was never really the best at evaluating my work before this year as I never knew what to say, however, this course and the tutors have helped me be more critical of my work and influenced me to make targets for the week ahead after each evaluation, which has helped hugely. Because of this help and new understanding, I managed to get an ‘excellent’ grade for my project one evaluations which shows that evaluating my own work is a strength for me now, and I hope to keep this grade up for the final project.
As well as written evaluations, doing the context and research work was actually really fun and interesting (considering I never used to like writing during secondary school)! I think that writing about things that interest me and will actually help me progress both during and after college as it is much better for me than doing lessons I didn’t enjoy in secondary school, and this has made me more motivated to do written work. As well as motivation, I feel that my vocabulary and punctuation has improved with the amount of writing I have been doing for this course. I have also learnt new musical terminology that helps me write about context and research, and shows my understanding of music in general and how to write about it. For this final project and the year ahead, I want to be able to do even more research and context work to get the grades in these fields up even more.
Weaknesses
One things I struggled with this year was the Lyric writing workshops during project three. I enjoy creative writing in the forms of short stories as I think my vocabulary has improved a lot this past year but when it comes to poems or lyrics, I can never seem to get my ideas down. I feel like the lyrics I wrote always seem unfinished and almost cringeworthy to me, but I know if I put music to it, the lyrics would work much better. I need to work on lyric writing and phrasing if I plan to work on my own music in the future. I also need to think about how I can make more interesting rhyme schemes or even try no or little rhyme scheme, which could make for an interesting song structure.
I think that timing became an apparent issue for myself at certain times in this course. I have always struggled with timing (like in secondary school exams) as I never finish things in time, or realise how much time I have left and rich to complete it. I especially struggled with project three as the role I had was so weighted as it reached the end of the unit, and I didn’t get to make the final practical product as perfect as I wanted it to be. In my personality test, it said that I was a perfectionist, which I agree with, and perhaps this trait has something to do with my timing issues as well! I could improve on this problem by trying to stay motivated and keeping a good track of time throughout the project, so I know when the final week will be coming up, and then I can plan ahead to have almost everything finished by then.
I don’t mind working in groups, however, I much prefer being able to work independently. Working in groups like the band in project one was really fun and I enjoyed rehearsing and playing live with them, however when it came to project two and even project three in some parts, I would much rather be left to my own devices and ask for help from peers or tutors if I really need it. I think I will also work by myself for the most part in my final project, as then I have full creative freedom and I can play it to my own strengths. To work on this weakness, I could plan to work with groups later in the course and do more work with the project one band (or even different ones).
Something I really improved on this year was my general music theory and reading notation skills. However, I still have lots of things I want to learn and improve on. I plan to take a grade five music theory exam during this course which will help improve this field a lot, and therefore will develop my general knowledge of music and how it works. I also need to practice with reading and writing music notation as I am not the most confident with that, especially melodies because as a drummer, I specialise mostly in rhythm notation.