AmusED

As a musician I have a set of sectors which I can match myself to. Sector mapping is very useful where you can decide on a number of diverse routes to your main profession and ways to accomplish it in the near future. It helps to assess your abilities and put them to good use.

So the main profession that I am into is being a music teacher. Therefore it is divided into three sectors by itself being 

# Music teacher in schools

# Private Music Tutor

# Music teacher on youtube or other social media platforms

Music teacher at schools is a routine job that is the main part of my profession. You would help young people to learn how to express themselves by playing, composing and performing music and enjoy listening to music. It includes 

# planning lessons to suit the needs of the students

# teaching pupils to play an instrument and to read and understand music

# helping pupils prepare for music exams, competitions and performances. 

Being a music teacher at school is a whole lot of an experimental playground where I can experiment some of the methods of my teaching to the students I teach, and possibly get a response that can overwhelming or also depressing! 

Being a private music tutor is not so identical where I get to meet individual people, (or as a small group) and get to assess their musical needs and train them accordingly. Its a place to learn more about yourself, and developing your own method of lesson delivery and improving aspects of your teaching. 

And on the other side is YouTube which is a much wider audience you could have. YouTube is the biggest platform for music education! It has more than 500,000 educational videos and music tutorial videos constitute a significant amount. It is one of the major business platforms on social media where any musical content in the forms of bands, compositions and educational stuff can be promoted and be accessible to a number of users. So YouTube is a place where I can have a digital audience to my tutorial videos where I can share lessons personalised for my subscribers and to the want of the whole youtube community. 

Who am I ?

I am Vijay, a Musician and a Music Teacher by profession from India. I’ve been learning music from my good old school days and I had this passion about Music education and I started tutoring some of the kids in my neighbourhood. And that lead to a passion burning more to be an Inspiring Music Teacher which I am still working towards! I had done my grades in Piano and Guitar with Trinity College London, and I have a teaching experience of about 6 years now, and in the process I’ve been owning a music school and been training kids for Grade exams in different instruments! In this Masters programme I have come to develop a much bigger portfolio for myself and to learn new aspects of becoming a better music teacher and as an overall musician!

Wider Interests as a Music Creative

As a musician out of all my interests in the whole of fields of music, the particular thing I am interested in is Music education! Music education according to me is a vital part of any human being and Music is for all! I believe everyone has the elements of music in them, and its just a matter of bringing it out.. and that’s something all the music creatives go on voting for! 

Music education has been less identified in many countries and not equally valued by all the people and institutions of the same country! There are many aspects of Music education which are scientifically proven that makes our minds more effective and focussed. Subjects like design and technology, music, art and drama are vitally important for children to develop imagination and resourcefulness, resilience, problem-solving, team-working and technical skills. These are the skills which will enable young people to navigate the changing workplace of the future and stay ahead of the robots, not exam grades. These meta-skills are critical in all sectors, not just the creative industries. And that raises a need for quality music to reach every person and music education is made necessary for everyone. 

The contribution of music to the world is much more than many other sectors. From symphony orchestras to brass bands, rock groups to chamber music ensembles and cathedral choirs to spectacular musical theatre, music making is defined by its excellence and diversity. 

My Aim as a Music educator is to offer quality music education and make it easily accessible! I want to promote music education to more number of people and make it an important resource for all schools and institutions. So I am involved in making of videos and getting myself out there as a music teacher, a voice that supports music education along with millions of people doing alongside me.

The Aims & Strategies of the Crash course

The Quarantine Crash course was organised with an objective to reach out people who would like to learn a new instrument and seeking for someone to help them achieve this goal. So the crash course was an idea brought up by me to attain this goal and also to develop a portfolio doing that! 

So the strategy was to pitch my idea to people of identical mindset, and to start a crash course by promoting it on social media and word of mouth. So I did this in partnership with Lifehouse School of Creative Arts and we promoted the crash course.. and got a decent number of enquiries to start our batch

Practice makes a man perfect they say! And in the process of perfection there are strengths attained.. Strengths are particular activities that are unique to each individual in their development process. So in this process of being a music tutor and throwing my efforts into this module I have gained some strengths which are very unique to me as a teacher and are skills that I have developed over the process of music making! 

One major strength I have acquired is Flexibility and speed in lesson planning! Planning different lessons for different people has been quite a tough task for me in the past. But thanks to the fieldwork project, I had a lot of experience on planning individual lessons for people who are beginners and also for intermediate players! 

Retention of students is also one of the strengths I’ve gained. The satisfaction level for the students I’ve been training is relatively high in the past few years. In the crash course this was displayed by my students being regular for all the days of the crash course! And also the feedback we received from all of them were amazing! More than 50% of the students were looking forward for the next intermediate level sessions and some others registering themselves for regular one on one lessons. 

Working on premier pro and creating a video tutorial is also something that I have been learning lately.. I have gained some flexibility with some aspects of creating the video like, inclusion of the Notations and smooth transitions between videos and much more. This has been an asset to me lately where I can edit the videos the way I wanted them to be!

The MD 7402 - Fieldwork for creativity module had a great start with our Tutor Matthew Lovett sharing his thoughts on the what lies ahead in the module. Mobilising an audience and performing a live event was the end result of the project ! 

To start with we had an experimental collaboration teaming with groups within our class, engaging ourselves in gathering some audience. So Me, Jo, Chloe and Tom were together as a team. We had to decide on what the outcome of the project is going to be? Many others in the class had ideas of making some tutorial videos, some podcasts and more. We gave it a thought, and as we were a combination of singers, Bassist, Piano players and also music producers we decided to have a go at making an educational video series on each of the different aspects of a song like lyric writing, chord theory, music production and editing! And we all agreed the best way to go is choosing a pop/R&B song and deciphering it into pieces talking through different components of the song. Meanwhile we had a ‘Story boarding’ session in our class which helped us to create a virtual audience and create a story based on which we were able to elucidate our aspects of the Video. A link to that post is here. We gathered some audience through a friendly survey asking them on what kind of music educational video they would like us to produce for them! We had a consensus ad idem with regards to what we needed our experimental project outcome to be and, depending on the survey results we decided to do an educational video on various aspects of a pop song.. 

So the planning of the project started and we were preparing our own contents and also the pattern of delivery where on of us made the planning of how we are going about the shooting of the video, editing and stuffs.. We decided that Tom would make a video on music production, Jo and Chloe on lyric writing and overall editing was to be shared within us! And this being a great resource for my project as well, I decided to a video on the most commonly used pop chord progressions we hear in our pop songs now, so as to give the viewer the idea of how to compose a pop song at different levels of production! And so we booked the studio at the Uni for filming the videos on music production and lyric writing and I made a video with my piano at home on the chord progressions. I edited my whole video so as to upload it on my channel..The youtube video is available at my channel @Vijayz9 and the video had a decent number of views as well..  

The next phase of the project was to gather some audience for our own projects and doing some experimental runs for the project and we had to do this online due to Covid 19 pandemic! My project was about conducting a workshop with a potential audience, people of all age groups who would like to learn an instrument at this time of lockdown. So I was looking for some people to pitch my idea and see if there can be any possible leads out of it. 

Surprisingly my friends (who were music teachers) at Church and came up with some crash courses for digital marketing, Zumba fitness courses and DIY stuffs over the lockdown to promote a new venture called Lifehouse School of Creative Arts which turned out to be an excellent platform to promote my crash course for Piano and Guitar. So I pitched my idea and we agreed to promote an 8 days crash course online on facebook and Instagram and the word spread! 

We had 20 enquiries for the first batch out of which 15 students were confirmed and we were ready to start! So I prepared my own syllabus for Piano and Guitar beginner course where I had the basic aspects of a piano & guitar, going up to some scales and chords for this beginner course. I then shared it with the group so that they could also follow the same pattern. This was a beginner’s crash course but to our surprise we had students coming in for more intermediate stuff as well.. I had two intermediate students for the first batch out of 6 students for whom I had to prepare lessons on the go assessing them and deciding on what to teach next. It has become one of my strengths now to prepare lessons with great flexibility and speed! So the first batch started on the 6th of May and went on till 15th of May.. and we had great feedbacks from the students who joined! And as there were more enquiries coming up we decided to start of a second batch which started out on the 24th of May and went on till June 3rd. I had about 5 students this time and mixture of all beginners and not so beginner students of all ages! The lessons were useful for everyone as it was personalised for each person this time.

School experience day @ Pate's! Inspiring teaching methods and an awesome faculty Elise!

The Two of my uploads for the Assessment 001 that is, the Modes of music tutorial and also the synth loops EP are a major resource and a good start for my portfolio for whole of this course. The main reason for the Tutorial video was to start learning to use my skills as a music tutor in filming a fully fledged music tutorial video which was my dream for a very long time and it also helps majorly in the teaching career as a great portfolio to show my progress as a music tutor online.