Pan Ramajay Steel Drum Festival - day 1

It's Monday morning. First official day of the workshop and I'm a little nervous. I rented an instrument, so I need to get used to it. It only has half of the notes marked. I need to sight read my parts and I don't know most of the others in the intermediate band yet.

I made it to the rehearsal room 20 minutes early to warm up. It's going to be ok now. I ran through all major scales and this pan, made by Mappo suddenly isn't so unfamiliar.

Jim is our faculty for this part of the morning. We start off each day with 30 minutes of "musical calisthenics", which, today involved a little music theory, and playing/singing/counting/clapping exercises. It looks like our band is 19 members strong.

This segued into the first rehearsal period. Jim had us work on his piece, a Papa Wemba composition in 12/8 time. Jim is good at breaking parts into manageable chunks to practice. We learned the whole A section at performance tempo by the end of the period.



Jim works with the ladies on bass

After a short break was rehearsal with Alan. After a short delay, we had printed charts to use. Alan has a different teaching style, where parts are learned at or near performance tempo. His chart is an arrangement of Human Nature.

After lunch is a lecture on buying a pan before rehearsals resume.

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