Whoopsie, I just noticed I haven’t posted anything in almost two months. How did that happen? School has kept me not so much busy as just preoccupied. The course I’m on is so weird. It was supposed to be a full time course, but it really isn’t. I’ve had about three lessons per week on average, barely anything at all to do for weeks at the time, and then one or two weeks that suddenly throw so much stuff at me I barely have time to sleep. And then back to doing almost nothing…
The classes and the disposition of the subjects is really strange too. I’m studying to be a flute teacher, so one would think that flute methodology is a fairly important class. It’s about how to teach the flute specifically, how to teach specific techniques, how to plan the courses, etc. But no. I had 5 lessons this semester, and that’s it. 5 hours. The only class that has actually been running throughout the whole semester is conducting class. Conducting is fun and all, and good to know something about if I ever need to lead an orchestra or a wind band or something, I guess, but I’m not a conductor. I’m not studying to be a conductor. I’m a flute teacher. I will be teaching one or two students at the time. So how come I have 15 x 90 minutes of conducting this semester, but only 5 x 60 minutes of flute teaching class? It confuses me.
Research methodology is a fun one too. We had an introduction in February, where the teacher asked us to come up with ideas on what to write an essay about for our third semester. At the next lesson, she gaves us a stack of papers about 1 inch thick and told us to read it by the next lesson, which was planned for the end of April. Aaaaalrighty. If I just wanted to learn everything on my own, I could have done that without going back to college… This is such a weird course, and so utterly disorganized. I guess I’m supposed to be a certified teacher by the end of it, but right now it feels like that is going to be on paper only. I don’t really feel all that much more competent now than I did when I started…
I’ve been quite busy with school for the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t had quite as much time to spend on making new videos as I would have wanted, but now I finally managed to finish one. It’s a brand new song called “From the corner of my eye” that I wrote a few weeks ago. Check it out!
As a part of my education, I’m doing a kind of internship at the local music school and teach music to little kids for about two hours every friday. It’s both and challenging, I like it a lot. I also have to do a full time internship for two weeks, and both observe a teacher at the music school and see how they teach, as well as teach a bit myself. I’m half-ways through the second week of this right now. It’s loads of fun, but it really does a number on your brain to do it full time. I normally start working at around 1 or 2 pm and work until about 8 pm every night, and holy crap is my brain tired when I get home. It’s really quite exhausting to work with kids and to stay focused and teach for a full day. But I like it. It would be awesome if I could find a job as a teacher after I’m done with this course. Part time teaching and part time performing would be about as awesome as it can get.
Heya, folks!
I got myself a brand new guitar! It’s a Walden D560CE acoustic steel string guitar. It has a pickup, so I can plug it into an amp. I went to all the big music stores in town and tried pretty much every guitar they had available in the price range I was interested in. The Walden sounded awesome, so I eventually bought it. There was a problem, though… After playing on it for about two days at home, I noticed there was a weird rattle whenever I played certain sounds, as if the guitar was distorting on its own. So I took it back to the shop. The guitar guy was utterly confused and had no idea what might be causing the weird noise. But no problem, he ordered me a brand new Walden and told me to come pick it up next week. I did. So now I have an even newer replacement Walden. Sadly, this one doesn’t quite have the big and amazing tone the other one had, but it’s still better than the other models I tried.
In other news, I recorded a new video of my song “Falling out of love” and put it up on YouTube. I started recording it several days ago, but because of a stubborn cold my voice sounded pretty funky, so I had to wait a few days before I could record the vocals and finish it. You can see me playing my new guitar in this video. I even forgot to remove the sticker on the pick guard… Check it out!
My second video is now up on YouTube! I just couldn’t wait to get started on this one. I had so much fun making the first video, and the feedback I got for it was pretty awesome! Thanks a lot to everyone who helped promote it!
Now, I probably should have been studying psychology instead of recording this video, but oh well… The book is not going anywhere…
I’ve been thinking about making some kind of videos for my songs for a while now, but I didn’t really know how. I have plenty of ideas about how they could look, but I know precisely zip about video software and editing, so turning that into reality is another story altogether. So to just get my ass in gear and make one, I decided to start simple: simply film myself recording one of the songs and then do some very basic editing with a program called Ulead Video studio.
And so, here it is. Check it out and let me know what you think!
I am now officially back in college. I had my first lesson today, a 2 hour psychology class. Easing into it, indeed…
I’m actually quite happy to be back, I think this is going to be lots of fun. I’m going to be studying for three semesters, ending up a teacher. The classes I’ll be taking seem interesting, and the people in my class seem nice. It’s a little strange to be back, though. It’s been 3,5 years since I graduated from the performance program, but in some ways it feels like I never left this place. Things are pretty much the same. But there’s one thing I haven’t missed, and that is getting up this early. It’s going to take a while to get used to it again…
Uncategorized | Sami May 17, 2010 | 
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