Hey folks,

I'm running a Rock School from 4-8 April in Ipswich. There are a few places remaining so if you are interested it's not too late to book a place.

The Rock Schools run over five days during school holidays and are open to all 11-17 year olds regardless of previous experience. Under the guidance of professional musicians students write, rehearse and record original music at a popular Ipswich based recording studio, and on the final day perform a concert to friends and family. 

You don't even need an instrument; we provide everything you need to make music.

Learn more at the Kick! Music Schools website. If you have any questions drop us an email!

Ross

There are some great things on the internet, but this has to be one of my new favourites. The Chrome Music Lab is a collection of cool music experiments built using the Web Audio API (more about that here).

From the Chrome Music Lab website:

Music is for everyone. So this year for Music In Our Schools month, we wanted to make learning music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. Chrome Music Lab is a collection of experiments that let anyone, at any age, explore how music works.

The experiments are great fun to play around with (the Rhythm and Oscillator are my favourites) and a great educational tool. If you are a learning an instrument, a parent of someone learning an instrument or a teacher — check it out!

Take 5 minutes to watch this. It's incredible.

Martin Molin designed and built the entire machine (14 months work) and composed the music. There are some incredibly talented people out there and Martin is clearly one of them! 

Visit www.wintergatan.net to learn more about the project and how the machine was made.

I was recently asked to compile a few videos of me drumming, so I thought I'd share them with you as well. Some of the videos are a few years old so please excuse the ridiculous haircut!

I'll add to this playlist as I come across more videos (I'm sure there are more out there) and when I get round to filming a few more.

Enjoy!

View the playlist on Youtube

Photo by Robert Dickow

I love instrumental music. I don't know a huge amount of people who share my obsession but in case you're curious, which I hope you are, below is a playlist of my favourite instrumental tracks and albums on Spotify.

The playlist contains quite a variety of music all loosely categorised as instrumental. Including modern classical (a.k.a neo-classical), drone, electronic, minimalist, percussive — all sorts really. I'd suggest putting it on shuffle and skipping past anything that doesn't take your fancy, it's quite likely the next track will be completely different.

Artists featured include Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, A Winged Victory For The Sullen, Stars Of The Lid, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Jon Hopkins, Julia Kent, Max Richter, Peter Broderick and Rival Consoles... To name a few!

Enjoy!

ps. If you have any recommendations please send them my way!

View on Spotify