RSL Music Practitioner diary entry 1

RSL Music Practitioner diary entry 1

A summary of my musical journey

From as far back as I remember, Music has always played a big part in my life. Some of my earliest memories included watching music videos on MTV in the lounge with my family. The one video that I remember vividly was the music video for Duality by Slipknot which was realised in 2004, I would have been 4 at the time.

However it wasn’t just music videos that influenced my early taste in music, my Mother always used to play songs by Tracy Chapman and Yazoo in the kitchen and my Dad would often play Metallica or Pearl Jam in the car. This all led to me having a very mixed taste in music, which is useful as now I can appreciate aspects of all genres of music.

In year 4 I was attending West Park middle school, and in this year my Mother signed me up to take Drum classes. I would go on to take Drum classes until year 9, when I decided the classes were no longer helping me progress as a drummer. It was during this year of High School that I and some friends had started our first band, we would practise almost every lunch time and although we never had anything going for us musically, the whole thing was a lot of fun. I was entered as part of a School band into ‘Skoolfest’ which was an annual concert for schools. My group played one song, and I was awarded ‘Best drummer’ on the day. 

My friends and I continued our lunch time practising until, as the pressure of exams built up, we just started to do our own separate things. High school finished and I ended up applying for Worthing College.

During my first year of college, I started to build an interest in bass guitar. This was due mainly due to the work of famous bassist such as Slipknot’s Paul Grey who I found absolutely captivating in the way they performed live. Everything about the instrument appealed to me although at the time I was not even very aware of how the instrument worked. Eventually, on the 25th of November 2016, I bought my first bass guitar.

I started to practise bass guitar every single day, a ritual I still continue, and with a lot of determination I found myself starting to pick up the basics and start to play simple songs. As my skills began to develop, my older brother put me in contact with a friend of his who was a bass teacher and before long I started private bass lessons, now I have one bass lesson every two weeks.

Altogether, the influences developed from listening to multiple genres of music from an early age is what has led me to want to pursue a career in music. For this reason I dropped History A level in my second college year, instead joining the course in RSL Music Practitioner.