Music Mentoring with Brighter Sound

Following on from my music mentoring blog in November I wanted to share with you all how our mentoring module has been going so far…

In previous years we had an outline of how we thought the programme would run and then adapted it to suite the individual needs of our mentees. This time, in keeping with the true spirit of mentoring, we wanted to find out the needs of the mentees first and plan our programme around them.

This can be a risky approach. As anyone who has worked with young people will know, ascertaining what they need and want is not always straight forward… And, too much talking and not enough doing can lead to boredom and disinterest!

So, I was a little nervous before the session…. I needn’t have been. We had a great team involved who facilitated a group discussion and the mentees were keen to talk. After the group discussion, we had some one to one time with our mentees and asked them three simple questions:

• Where are you now? - Personally - Spare time - Musically

• Where are you heading? - Personally - Spare time - Musically

• What do you need to get there? - Personally - Spare time - Musically

From these conversations, common themes emerged, including: • Lyric writing • Song writing • Recording / Production • Getting gigs • Online marketing 

The team and I quickly spotted that these areas of interest covered many of the areas involved in the music making process, from initial ideas generation to taking a finished product to market.

With a break for Christmas, every two weeks, we held a group session focussing on one of these topics, brining in experts in each area to facilitate, alongside in-house staff.

Supported by one to one meetings with our mentees, focussing on individual specific needs, these sessions have formed the structure for our programme so far and have provided us with an adaptable, well-evaluated model going forward.

A point to note – if you are going to take this approach – and ask these kind of questions, you need to be open to the responses you get back, whatever they may be, and be able to adapt accordingly…

For example, for one of our mentees the main areas of need were much more personal than musical (such as finding employment) and as such our efforts were focussed in these areas rather than the musical activities we are used to…

I am currently in the process of pulling together all the resources we have gathered so far – this should be completed shortly – if you would like to see this or would like any advice about running your mentoring project, please don’t hesitate to get in touch using mike@brightersound.com.