Inclusive Practice - The Hope Creative, Session 4 2016-17

The new year brought fresh hopes and talent to the January’s Hope Creative session. During a mentorship meeting myself and Lu decided to introduce the music recording process to the participants. I have a rudimentary recording set up that I use for my youtube channel so I bought in the microphone and interface and we hooked it up to Lu’s laptop and ran a popular and intuitive program called GarageBand.

The participants were really keen to use the home studio and we produced some high quality material. For the majority of the session I supervised and encouraged the children while they recorded their songs or jams. X had previously written and performed a song in the last session so in this session we laid down the guitar and drum track and we will follow it up with a vocal track in the next session.

Y had had a period of absence from the Hope Creative project so It was nice to see her return and get engaged with music again. She also made use of the recording equipment and performed a very heartfelt vocal cover of a song called ‘Dancing in the Sky’ - A song she told me she related to because of the recent passing of her foster father.

Z made great use of the BPM iPad in this session and used the video editing software to produce a very entertaining montage of himself performing and posing in photos. This was a great example of a child-led philosophy as he came up with the vision of producing the video and then used his technical knowledge to produce a real outcome.

During our monthly reflective practise we agreed it was one of the best sessions yet at BPM Southmead due to the high levels of participant engagement we witnessed.

Stay tuned!