Final Reflective Entry

Over the last 9 months I have learnt a lot in this course and gained many new skills and abilities. At the beginning of the course I wasn't very confident at playing music in front of an audience however I feel over the time of this course that has changed greatly. I was able to play the autumn concert without being nervous and I was also able to play other events with enough belief to pull through. An example of this is when we played love story for a lunch time performance at college. At one point in the song I accidentally played the wrong chord progression however I managed to recover it quickly without making a scene. I feel if this happened at the beginning of the course I would have panicked and ruined the show.


Alongside this my skills at playing guitar have greatly improved I feel that this is due to being pushed and given challenges to overcome. A good example of this is when we had to create our original songs in the style of songs from certain decades. In our 60's style song "lines" my learning mentor Henry suggested a solo but he did not show us one or tell us how to make one. Due to my practicing at home and in my band of learning scales I was able to whip up a solo that matched the 60's style of music.


At the beginning of the year in my First entry I set myself a target to get better at playing Bass and Piano. Although I am still learning both instruments I have played bass in a few pieces throughout the course such as our cover of The Cure - -Boys Don't Cry and our cover of I predict a riot of which we played half of the song in the style of folk and half in the style of disco. This put my knowledge and bass skills into use and overall it went really well because of this I would say I have started to reach my target of being able to play bass. On the other hand my piano work still isn't very strong and could still use a lot of work therefore I shall continue practicing.

Overall i feel that a lot of things went very well over the year, for example my overall skills at playing guitar have improved, my ability to work as an ensemble has got better and my musical knowledge has greatly improved for example i am now aware of the different types of male and female vocal types eg. falsetto, bass and tenor. This is good to know as it has helped me learn how to sing better which is useful  both inside college and outside of college.