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In these crazy times many of us are having to home-school our children with varying degrees of difficulty, (I am ashamed to say that my 6 year old has taught me a few things over the past weeks)! Luckily there is a ton of help available out there and what’s more most of it is free! You can get lessons and guidance on P.E. from Joe Wicks every morning and BBC bitesize is now on iPlayer covering any number of subjects. Ravebugs has also been contributing with our weekly live-streams on a Wednesday morning. These cover everything from fun bucket and junk drumming to Key Stage 1 music topics such as Pulse and Rhythm. They are always very informal and light hearted as those of you that have joined us will testify.
All of our past streams can be found on our YouTube channel along with some lessons and other drum-related videos. Just search for Ravebugs, and while you are there don’t forget to hit that subscribe button! Anyway that’s all from us this week. Keep safe and have fun. Phill.
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So we’re into the fifth week of lockdown for us here at Ravebugs, and the country has just been told to expect at least another three weeks before restrictions may be lifted... What does your average drum teacher do with all this extra time? Other than relentlessly practicing and honing his craft of course... Well we’ve been keeping busy with our Facebook Live Drumming Sessions, which seem to get noisier by the week! We’ve found out how to live-stream these to YouTube at the same time, though our settings appear to need a few tweaks, so that’s meant lots of fiddling about! Also keeping Phill busy, the online lessons he’s been doing via FaceTime, Zoom and Skype - one student commented this week that she actually prefers doing her drum lesson via FaceTime, as it means she can see Phill sitting at his kit while she sits at her own. She probably finds he drinks a lot less of her tea when he’s 20+ miles away too! As most people know, our youngest two children are aged 6 and 4. We’ve planned for quite some time to get some musical instruments out in the garden for them to play, and are pleased to announce that we’ve finally done it. Phill has attached some triangles of various sizes to the side of our trampoline, and we now regularly hear the ting-ting of a little tune when the children are outside. Phill’s other creative project for the garden is a set of wind chimes. Again made from triangles of various sizes, Phill put his welding skills to good use to attach them all together at the top, then added some strings to suspend the lower triangles from. He’s hung it up in the garden, but, typically, I don’t think there’s been a breath of wind since! What creative things have you been up to during the lockdown? As always keep safe Phill  We’re another week on in the Covid-19 Situation, and Lockdown Life continues - it’s very different to what we were used to of course, but we’re all getting used to it at Ravebugs. Our children, aged 6 and 4, seem to be enjoying not having to go to school and nursery, and I think they grow slightly more feral with every passing day.
Their wildness makes for some interesting Wednesday mornings. We’ve been doing a live-streamed drum session each week, exploring different rhythm/drumming ideas especially aimed at the Key Stage 1 age group, though suitable for all ages to join in and have a go! We’re doing this via our Facebook page, so it’s live at 10.30 each Wednesday morning, but then available to watch at any time after that on both Facebook and on our YouTube channel. These sessions are great fun, but our children need to work on their professionalism - the first week they were marching round with saucepans on their heads (they were meant to be hitting them with wooden spoons!), the second week our 6-year-old managed to somehow fall off a bucket (she was meant to be hitting it!), and this week our 4-year-old turned up late wearing a pair of his sister’s tights! We never did get an explanation out of him... We’re working on how to broadcast our live-streamed sessions on YouTube as well - early investigations suggest that we need more followers to get this to work reliably - so please, do subscribe to our Ravebugs channel, and tell everyone you know to as well! As always stay safe and keep making music. Well, what strange times we find ourselves in!
If someone had said to me this time last month that I’d have just endured - sorry, enjoyed - two weeks of social isolation with my family, and that I’d be looking at a lockdown for the foreseeable future, I’d have thought they were getting an early start on April Fool’s Day. But no, here we all are, getting used to a new way of life. And how does it change things for Ravebugs? Well, I’ve had to move almost all of my activities online! I’m so happy to report that this has worked really well with drum lessons. My students are able to connect via Skype, FaceTime or Zoom and have a full lesson. I am able to both see them at their drums and demonstrate techniques etc to them on my own kit. I have also started giving students access to a student ‘portal’ on the Ravebugs website, which allows me to share music and charts with them. For my younger students, parents can also see their child’s progress, contact me and track how much practice etc is going on. For students that don’t have their own kit at home, I have been modifying lessons so that they can still learn while using a practice pad, and we have even been enjoying using Facebook Live to broadcast drumming sessions to viewers in their own home who want to make some noise on everyday household items such as washing baskets, buckets and jugs! It’s a bit of a different story of course when it comes to the live performance aspect of my work, this has become a bit impossible since all pubs, bars, cafes and theatres closed, however I’m in regular contact with all my band-mates and we’re still putting music together, recording separately and sharing it between us so that we’re able to keep the momentum going. Prior to starting Ravebugs, I worked with computers and saw many developments over the years, but I could never have dreamt what a difference the technology would’ve made to our lives today during the lockdown. How lucky are we to be able to do things like drum lessons, and even to be able to just stay in touch with others in our community, all from the safety of our own homes? #stayhome #keepsafe #keepplaying |
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