7th May 2010

Today is the big day. We're supposed to perform in our groups today, and get assessed on it to boot. However, it turns out that we'll also be assessed in the exam week, and that will probably help our score, because there's now 2 reference assessments. Before we started, however, some of us submitted our commercial jingle drafts. I tried making mine better, and hopefully it worked. Then, we started the performances. Each group was given a piece of paper (one for each member) to give comments on the other groups. Since we were group 3, we had a chance to observe the other groups first. I think all the groups did well, the first group seemed like they practiced really hard, the second group did great on teamwork, and the 4th group was very expressive. We all really enjoyed the performances. Group 3 got mostly positive feedback, and I'm very happy for that.

4th May 2010

Today we had our blogs and videos checked. We are already supposed to have 8 videos and 16 blog entries at this point in time. Mr Herry was very strict with today's deadline, he said that if we still didn't have any videos, we'd get zero for our personal engagement criterion. Luckily, I already uploaded the required entries. We spent almost the whole theory session checking everyone's blogs, and we used our practical session to practice on the performance. We'll be assessed this Friday.

Fourth week practice videos

This is an exercise that helps extend the fingers' reach. It is done by doing something like a chromatic scale exercise, but it's diagonal and each variation has the player skip a fret in between their index&middle, middle&ring, and ring&little fingers.
Finger reach exercise (Tuesday)

This is another exercise that helps train the left hand fingers to move faster. It is a modified chromatic scale, but it forces the fingers to keep on the frets before moving to the next string's frets. By doing so, this exercise forces the fingers to stay close to the fretboard, thereby enhancing their efficiency and speed.
Speed exercise (Friday)

30th April 2010

Today we had our jingle drafts checked. There were around 6 or 7 students who already submitted their compositions. They were really good, except for mine. I really liked Andrew Sie's jingle, as there was a funny whistle sound. Mine wasn't so good, it sounded like an advertisement for some coffin shop. Afterwards, Mr Herry explained that 2010 version cannot be opened with 2009 of Finale etc.

27th April 2010

Today we had our reflections checked. Since I didn't do up till the 23rd of April's reflection, I had to go down to the library and update my blog. I forgot to do it because I was focusing on the personal project, but that isn't an excuse. After I updated the blog, I went back up to the 4th floor. By the time I got back up, not much was left. I missed quite a lot of things, mainly some more rehearsals on our group performances. Since around 2 of our members (Ian and I) went down to the library, our group was not called upon. Then, we had the longest instrument session in our semester. We were able to get quite a lot of kinks in the performance sorted out. For next session, we'll have to submit our Jingle drafts in Finale format.

Third week practice videos

Kiss From A Rose practice (Tuesday)

Evocacion practice (Friday)

23rd April 2010

Today we had a review of our tasks. First, Mr. Herry asked us to submit the 16-bar jingle draft. I'm not too sure if he really asked us to do so the last class, but I may have forgotten. If I remember correctly, almost all other students didn't do it either. So, Mr. Herry gave us some time to create a 4 bar intro of it. We needed to use 4 instruments, so I picked Guitar, Piano, Flute, and Violin. I just made a simple melody which fits with the triads, but I'm not too sure if it sounds good (I'm not even sure how it sounds). After making the intros, we submitted them for checking. We then saw Mr. Herry check our reflection blogs' videos. It was quite embarassing to see yourself play. After that, we did some more rehearsals. This week's pretty busy as there is a Personal Project due date on the 27th.