Another Day, Another Lesson...

I've rather liked this weeks Wednesday if I'm honest. I don't have many lessons on Wednesdays so they are fairly short and sweet. My Uni day starts at a quarter to one in the afternoon and usually passes by rather quickly starting with Music in Context. Todays Music in Context lesson did seem to drag a little bit as today was the Deadline for the Bibliography for the next two essays due in. I, being a good student had already handed it in to my tutor the day before so I wasn't one of the ones rushing to finish the work. It was a fairly simple task. I understand that some people had been on holiday or away, I just don't get how people can leave it until last minute. Admittedly, I forgot that I had to hand it in as a pdf file, but that was easy to sort out.

With everyone else finishing their work, I was left to make a start on my essay. I managed just over one hundred words today. It doesn't sound like a lot but it has been checked over and I seem to be on the right track with it by not referencing too much and paraphrasing.

Again, if I'm honest our next and last lesson was a little boring today. I don't know if I'm just being mean because we had a teacher in training, but I feel like he may have just confused me. He focused the lesson on electronic music and made it seem like thats all we could produce in sequencing. I find it difficult expressing any kind of excitement for electronic music other than the really cheesy stuff, my best example being: Soul Control - 'Chocolate Choco Choco'. Even that is arguable whether it is even strictly electronic music. He went on to show us some basic electronic drum patterns and I sort of just looked up in shame. When you know your music theory up to grade five standard and you are being shown how to create a rather basic "four to the floor" drum beat using only semi-quavers in a 4/4 time signature and how you should learn to recognise the drum theory, you start to question a few loopholes. What about the triplets? Which, I may add, he did not cover. I'm not even gonna start on the powerpoint.

I feel like I'm being a bit brutal so I'm going touch on the brakes and stop it now. Apologies in advance if he somehow ends up reading this, but maybe take it as advice.

Today was also the day that I had my first proper tutorial with Matt, my tutor. He's ace, really couldn't have asked for anyone better. Originally, I was going to go first into the music office but I told the other two guys that they may as well go first because I know I'm going to go on. I had a lot to talk about and I was right. It's good to be considerate sometimes. I do feel like Matt might have seen me as a problem child at first, but I hope our chat cleared a few thing up for him too. I'm really not just doing this course because I had no other option and my mindset is now completely fixed. We talked first about the things he needed to talk to me about, general things like asking me how I'm getting on with each individual lesson to work out my weak points more than anything and then eventually I got to talk to him about all the other bits that had been ticking over for the last week or so. I had them all written down, almost too organised but I spoke about almost everything that I felt I needed to. He also cleared up a few misunderstandings regarding the Sequencing lesson earlier and told me that I could do literally what ever genre I wanted as long as it meant I could replicate it in Logic and meet all of the criteria. I'm now thinking of doing a progressive rock track for that, even though the guitars might end up sounding a bit pants but I would much rather create something well within a genre that I am interested in. There is literally no point otherwise because I'm just not going to have the same level of motivation. My talk with Matt did end up being about half an hour long and I knew it would be. I think it could have gone on much longer if we had time because I still missed some little things I wanted to mention because I didn't write them down! Silly me. I guess I will know for the next time...