Seventh week practice videos

These are this week's practice videos
Monday (Scales C F G)

I think I improved in the scales, and learned a different way to do the G scale.

Saturday (Evocacion)

Evocacion again, I don't know too many songs and we have lots of assessments.

21st May 2010

Today we practiced our listening skills. Mr Herry played several notes on the keyboard, and we were asked to identify the notes and notate them on a piece of sheet music. It was very hard for me, and I only got several notes right. I guess I have to work on listening skills. After that, Mr Herry called out several students (I think they were Ade, James, Kezia, and Tiffany) to do a demonstration in front. Mr Herry played several complex sounding notes and asked them to repeat the notes. Most of them were able to do so on the fly, and it was a very cool performance. It would be great if I, too, could have listening skills on par with them.

18th May 2010

Today we learned transposing again. This time, it was between scales and not between clefs. At first I wasn't quite sure of how to transpose between scales, something in me told me that I could. After a short explanation, turns out that something was right, I've somehow learned transposing. We were supposed to transpose "Alice in Wonderland" from C to G. I had some trouble even though I understood the theory of how to do it (still slow on notation). However, transposing while looking at both the C and the G scales helped me a lot. In the end, we didn't have to transpose the whole song, only 16 bars, but I did more than 16.

Sixth week practice videos

Here are this week's videos:
Tuesday (C, F, and G major scales)

Saturday (Kiss from a rose)

I think I almost memorized the 3 scales above, but I haven't been practicing much lately and the song I played dropped a lot on fluency.

14th May 2010

Today we checked some more jingles. They were also good. Andrew Sie's jingle really fits his commercial, of a mosquito repellent. The intro represented the mosquitoes' attack, with an ominous sound. It sounded a bit like Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" though. After a short pause, the music gets relaxing and slow. It really suits the "minyak telon" commercials. We also checked the blogs. I think maybe the blogs should be checked outside of class to save time. We also had to submit our journals to check the daily reflection. I'm missing quite a lot of entries, since I uploaded some of them directly to the blog and didn't write them on my journal. All in all, I think I only had about 5 out of 11 entries. In instrument class, we practiced the scales again. Mr John also taught us the spanish strumming style which was pretty cool. The right hand is in the "heavy metal" sign, which turns out to be originally from Spain and represents the bull for strength.

11th May 2010

Today Mr Herry checked several of our jingles. We listened to them, and all of them were pretty good. After we heard our classmates' works, I think Mr Herry was quite disappointed that only a few of us were using the bass. So, he gave us a short briefing about the bass clef, also with where the notes are positioned. After the short lecture, he gave us worksheets. We are supposed to transcribe the song from the treble clef to the bass clef. I had some problems at first but once I got the hang of it it wasn't so hard. I still took quite a long time though. Then, in instrument class, we learned scales. This was to prepare for the upcoming practical exam. Mr John taught us a shortcut to remember many scales at once, all we had to do was to remember the pattern and use different base notes.

Fifth week practice videos

This week Mr Herry told us we needed to also upload a practice video for the group performances too. I recorded it but I don't think I did too well, I don't fully remember the song.
Tuesday (Evocacion yet again)

Thursday (This Love chords)

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.

20th April 2010

Today Mr. Herry showed us several advertisements in preparation of our assessment, making a jinle music advertisement for a business product. It's a collaboration between Business and Music. Some of the ads and videos we watched were: Orchestral music for videos, Pond's advertisement, World cup song (Waving flag), Roscoe's chicken and waffles, and rolex watch. We also watched a funny video about how music should fit the product lyrically (Viagra and "You Raise Me Up"). After lots of laughs and applause, we learnt quite a lot of things about advertising, of how music can help build up the mood and atmosphere. Afterwards, we all went to show the class how much each groups have advanced. I don't feel that our group is making too much progress.

Second week practice videos

Tuesday (Tremolo practice)

Saturday (Evocacion practice)

These videos are quite short compared to the first week's practice session.

16th April 2010

Today we had our music test. Since we had more time to prepare, I was more confident before we started the paper. However, my confidence got a dent on it when I heard Mr Herry announce that we only had 40 minutes for 40 questions. I thought to myself that I couldn't do a question per minute (I'm still slow on notation). When I opened the sheets, I was greeted by a plethora of history questions. Thankfully, most of them were quite easy. One of them, however, struck me hard. We had to write a short biography of our favorite musician from our genre, and my memory sadly failed me. I didn't remember much detail of Duke Ellington (birth date, death date, etc.). Instead, I wrote what I could, including some awards he got. After finishing the history section, I moved on to the notation section. Luckily, I somehow finished the whole paper, before time was up, too. There were dominant 7th chords, major 7th chords, minor 7th chords, 9th and 11th chords. Turns out there was a pattern I could manipulate, so I finished early. I felt very relieved when I finished the paper.

13th April 2010

Today we unexpectedly had our singing assessment. It was unexpected because the Facebook message said that today we're going to have our test. Thus, I didn't really prepare much for the singing assessment. Thankfully, the song we sang was "I Got Rhythm", which coincidentally also had very simple lyrics. This helped me memorize the song quite fast. Moreover, the catchy tune also helped. My name also starts with "K", so I had quite a late turn. Before the assessment, I got quite nervous, but after I started singing it helped a bit. This was mainly due to the "I got my man" segment of the lyrics, which still amuses me. It was a fun experience, and we enjoyed each other's performances and dances. There were some terrific movements on the stage back then.

First week practice videos

Mr. Herry asked us to upload videos of our practice sessions, 2 a week, so here are mine:
Thursday's (Kiss From A Rose practice):


Saturday's (Tremolo practice):

P.S. You can hear snorting sounds? That's my brother

9th April 2010

Today we reviewed our questions. These questions are based on our individual booklets, and are grouped according to our genres. For example, the Swing questions are mixed up. We saw the other class's questions, and also from our own. Then, we were supposed to choose several good ones. Copies of questions should be avoided. After looking over, we only got 10 questions. We were peer-quizzed on the questions we picked. One group would be asked their questions by another group. My group did fairly well, answering all our questions correctly. After the peer-quiz is done, we sang "I Got Rhythm" all together. The "I Got My Man" part still succeeds to amuse me.