by Author Alexander Holmes

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Soda Beat music sessions are organised by Club Soda

Soda Beat music sessions are organised by Club Soda: http://www.clubsoda.org.uk

Every Monday evening at 

Hoodoos

Matthews Yard

1 Matthews Yard, 

Croydon CR0 1FF

http://matthewsyard.com

Between 5 -7pm

 

Are for young people with learning disabilities aged 14 to 25 who want to play music and socialise with other music lovers. You don’t have to have any musical ability just an interest in music will do. The sessions are also for young people who already play an instrument and might be ready to form a band and perform live. In fact, anyone who joins Soda Beat Sessions will have the opportunity to perform live at one of our regular Soda Beat events.

 

My name is Alexander Holmes I'm one of the music tutors that lead the sessions. I'd like share some of the practises that we have found to work quite with participants at these sessions.  

  improvisations and warm up exercises

An exercise that I really like is Oblique Strategies by Brain Eno & Peter Schmidt which is essentially a word - or sentences - association game, this website  'randomly' picks one of 55 sentences / suggestions (such as 'Change Instrument Roles', 'Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element' and 'Just Carry On') and then the participants react to the sentences musically. They were originally intended for help musicians that were a bit struck and to give them inspiration for a different approach. This worked well in the early Soda Beat session as an ‘ice breaker’ especially at the beginning of the project when the participants didn't know one another yet. We cut out little physical cards with the 55 sentences on and asked each participant to pick one, then picked the ones we liked the most from the cards picked.

We also found that exercises from the John Stevens handbook for improvised music workshop ‘search and reflect’ - such as ‘Click piece’ ‘Sustain’ and ‘Scribbling’ worked really well as warm ups at the beginning of the session. We introduces these pieces to the participants as a ‘soundcheck’ - to develop of a conventional terminology around the pieces so members of the groups could easier see a practical use for them in any gig situation - father then improvisations, although they invariably lead to  improvised pieces and Jams.

Alternative / spontaneous sound tracks

We project clips from feature films - The open scene of the original 1977 Star Wars and the ‘Stargate’ scene from2001: A Space Odyssey seemed to work especially well - with the sound switched off and encouraged participants to make alternative sound tracks, reacting musically to what they saw on the screen. We then asked participants (one at a time) to act as a conductor for the soundtracks i.e. one person stands at the front facing the group with a conductors stick (in ours case a drum stick) and gives basic instructions to the musician as to how they feel the music should sound at that particular moment, e.g. raising the conducting stick higher if they wanted the music to become louder, low if they wanted it to be quieter, signalling to a single - or groups of - musician/s if they wanted to hear a solo or a small ensemble. This seemed to work really well in the early sessions and helped to galvanise the group. These haven't worked as well in recent sessions now we have composed some more ‘conventional’ songs. i.e. it was harder to go back to the more improved material. 

The Participants enjoy playing a few cover versions (e.g. I want to break free by Queen, London’s Call by The Clash, Billie Jean by Michael Jackson) in the first half of the session - after the ‘soundcheck’ to get them in the mood for writing their own songs.

Generating song lyrics for original compositions

We have used ‘cut up’ technique to generate song lyrics and got some good results. Here’s a link to the technique: http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/bowie-cut-up-technique.html

Session plans 

We found it was very useful to make clear session plans in advance and introduce them to participants right at the be beginning of each session, explaining what will be covered in the session, these seemed to work very well. 

Karaoke

In the break times we have solo Karaoke songs; we play the instruments backing from youtube and participants sing. Then the other participants give encouragement and  feedback.   

 

Troubles encountered

Some of the more technically advanced participants struggled with the diverse abilities in the group at first. However we encourage them to help the less technically adept members to develop their skills i.e. giving them the role of mentor to the other members that showed an interest in a particular instrument. E.g. if one member wanted to learn bass guitar and there was a technically quite advanced player in the group, they seemed happy to show / teach the learner. Which we observed encouraged a sense of community.  

If you'd like to hear some of the music created in the sessions you can here: https://soundcloud.com/sodabeatsessions

If you would like to find out more about SodaBeat sessions please contact 

Oliver Tipper

info@clubsoda.org.uk

0208 2531034