Yesterday I attended the symposium I spoke about in my last blog. It was really interesting and I left feeling pretty inspired about the future with new ideas and some contacts too.
What surprised me was that whilst I expected to leave with most ideas about working within this field, I actually found myself relating everything back to my own musicianship and how I can bring that forward.
Thanks to the many shitty experiences I've had with accessing any level of support I have a bit of a distorted relationship with assisted technology. I'm always questioning whether I should be using things, wondering if impairments will improve only if I resist the equipment long enough and just generally second guessing the validity of my own needs.
In terms of music stuff I'm starting to feel much more as if actually I should just look at the end goal and do all I can to reach it. It's odd how we internalise this sort of crap really.
I realised yesterday that in order to make it fully accessible for me to make my own music and perform and create it live in the way that I want to I'm going to need much more than my loop pedal and current instruments. I'll need software and macbook to run it, a means of accessing it and that's before considering as well as suitable seating/wheelchair and PA support to access venues. I also need to have a serious think about my own health and the amount that I can actually reasonably do. I need to learn to manage my own health better. The exacerbation of my illness just after yesterday goes to show how important this is.
I had a good chat with people from Drake music and am hoping to gain some support and insight from them about the way forward as well as hopefully using some of their macs!
One of the pieces of kit that I had previously discovered but thought of more as something to work with others using but not so much use myself was the 'skoog'. This is an instrument designed to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. It looks like a cube with 5 buttons but actually by means of physical modelling (don't ask me waht that means) allows you to do far more than access 5 notes. It's also very fast to programme new samples, notes or chords so would be ideal for use whilst playing live. I'll be honest in that I did find it difficult to coordinate at first but it really does seem to be the most accessible thing oiut there and I'm sure it will get easier. It would be far more accessible to me than a keyboard or moving fast between multiple instruments on stage. Sadly, as with most things it is quite expensive for an individual to buy.
The beauty of all of this software and kit is that I could then use it for work with community music projects and that whilst learning to use it myself I would not only be developing my own musicianship but developing my skills in this particular field.
So, now I need to think of ways of moving this forward and start making music again in the meantime.
www.skoogmusic.com
www.drakemusic.org
No comments:
Post a Comment