- What has been your most difficult mentoring challenge so far? Why?
My most difficult challenge with my mentor has not been anything that we could have prevented or controlled. At various times, my mentor’s cats developed urgent health problems that my mentor had to address, which occasionally forced us to postpone lessons, slowing my learning slightly. However, this was not a large issue, because there was a lot of work to be done in between while composing and experimenting.
- What is working well? Why?
I think the rate at which we meet up with each other for mentoring is working well. We have our mentoring sessions every two weeks, which allows time for lots of self-learning and experimentation with different instruments and effects in between, but does not take up too much of my mentor’s time.
- What could be working better? Why?
I think that one thing that we could do better is try to move our lesson time to a better time. My mentoring sessions start at 3:45 on Fridays, which means that I have to go right after school finishes. This does not give me much leeway when being driven to my mentor’s home, where she mentors me. This has caused me to arrive a bit late numerous times, so it is definitely best if I can work something out to change the mentoring sessions to a different time in a way that makes it more convenient for both of us.
These last few weeks I have been continuing to compose and work on my piece, and have been experimenting with the beat sequencer to make a drum beat to go with my piece. The beat sequencer allows you to make a simple drum beat by placing notes from different parts of a drum set on different times during the piece. This allows you to fully focus on creating a simple beat, which you can add on to by experimenting on the real drums later to think of interesting fills and other additions to eliminate repetition. During my mentoring lessons, I have also been learning more about the program I am using, Logic Pro, and learning more about the aspects of music and how to create them myself.