So I am one of those few weirdos who directs a steel drum band. I was a little nervous when I first got my current job since it included teaching steel drums, and I had never even touched one before. Lucky for me, the instrument is amazingly easy to learn. Unlucky for me, I didn't have any steel drum music nor any money in the budget to buy some... So that meant I had to arrange music all year long. I happen to be pretty good at arranging, even if I do find it to be very tedious. In arranging music, I have to pick out the melodic and harmonic lines and then assign the parts to different drums. The nice thing about doing all of my own arranging is that I'm pretty good at it, unlike some of the people who actually get paid to do it. It's super annoying to buy an arrangement of a song and then realize that the person had no idea what he/she was doing and then have to rewrite all of the parts anyway. The bad thing is that it's just time consuming.
I'm very proud of my latest arrangement. In my steel drums class, I always take suggestions from my students, and for whatever reason, they've been requesting 80's music lately. For our concert on Wednesday, we're going to be playing Beat It, Axel F, and Africa. I suggested Axel F, which sounds absolutely amazing, but my students suggested the other ones. The last one I arranged was Africa, and while I was arranging it, I came across the following video that you just have to see:
Crazy, right? Well, wish us luck at our concert on Wednesday!
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2 comments:
That was very cool. I LOVED the rain effects.
I KNOW! I wish I had more kids in steel drums so that we could do something similar. I was going to try to have them do it anyway, but I don't think that there are enough of them to make it sound great, so I decided against it. It would be so much fun though.
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