Live lounge sessions

The following is a live lounge session which I had engineered and mixed as part of the traineeship.

The experience so far

Following Rushcliffe School I have mainly been taking part in the Monday and Friday Young Creatives open sessions as per usual. Also I have taken part in one video session.

The traineeship has been a very positive experience for me. In fact, it has been so much a positive experience that I have decided youth work is what I definitely want to make a career of. I had no idea what path I wanted to take in life prior to starting the traineeship, however since starting I have also enrolled onto a PTLLS course off my own back in order to be the best practitioner I can be and to hopefully help me progress from a traineeship to becoming a fully fledged leader.

Rushcliffe School

Following from music mayhem, I then spent a week with one of the casual leaders in a local secondary school. The young people here were aged from 8-16 as what we were facilitating was essentially a non-residential summer camp.

As YMCA Digital it was our role to plan and deliver sessions on the digital side of arts. We used resources such as iPods and radio mixers to create and explore.

We covered:

Podcasting - Where we had young people interview other young people and leaders that were part of the YMCA summer camps.
Animation - Where they used software on the iPads and plasticine to create a short animation following a script they had written.
News broadcast - We had them write and deliver a news item of their own choice.
Beatmaking - Using Garageband on the iPads we had them lean the basics of music production.

As wel as playing -

Ice breaker games
Sports
Name games

We received overwhelmingly positive feedback following the summer camp and this was a brilliant experience for me as it meant I got to work with children of all ages and in a somewhat more formal setting in which I felt like more of an educator.

Music Mayhem

Over the course of two weeks, music mayhem provided me with the perfect opportunity to put into practice all that I had learned so far about youth work and music leadership. Young people would be able to drop into the centre throughout the dy and state which activity they would like to take part in. They had a selection from:

Instrument tuition

Vocal Sessions

Recording time/engineering

Beat production

And depending on what they wanted to do and the numbers we did our best to deliver whatever was in demand. In music mayhem I learned a lot about flexibility and how to work both one and one and with groups of young people. Feedback from the vent was largely positive, and left me feeling a lot more confident with youth work.

July 19th

Today the shy and introverted young person came to NGY and I started some vocal and guitar tuition with him. I felt that I was really getting through to him and developing my youth work skills. 

July 17th

We took part in the second Fernwood session today. We played a few games based on pulse/tempo using percussion that we brought across from NGY. There were some young people that wanted to carry on taking part in production sessions however we used that opportunity to tell them that they should come down to NGY as today we were showing the another side to what we do.

July 13th

This was my third session on the traineeship. This session was primarily a jamming session where the young people, all musically inclined, picked up an instrument of their choice. They had a choice between more advanced instrumentation such as guitars, pianos and drums and the less experienced people were able to select an item from the box of percussion.

This was very engaging and inclusive and showed that whilst obviously there is value in providing structure during these sessions, sometimes it is better to allow creative freedom and nurture that side of young persons’ personalities.