Report on the Unique Dyslexic Get Creative music workshop

Hi blog readers hope you are all well and everything is going groovy.

Well have to report the music workshop on Monday 18th August went very well. The venue The Cupar Youth Café was excellent.

I have to give a big thanks to Linsey Neilson who runs the café, to Brogan, Steph and Katie who volunteered their time to help move all the equipment into the venue for Mark Small Productions and who also got involved with the workshop.

A big thanks to Mark and Jack for sharing their experience and very expensive equipment to run the workshop. Finally a big thanks to Lecia for the great lunch.

From left to right its Steph, who had a great singing voice, Linsey, Katie another great singer and acoustic guitarist and Brogan who is a bass player.

Got a wide range of participants aged from 15 to over 50 all of which, apart from one, was dyslexic. Have to say I was very nervous about this workshop because I really had no real idea what was going to be happening.

As usual we have a little get to know each other session and also chatted about experiences of being dyslexic. We got some pretty candid remarks from some about the negative experiences they had as dyslexics in school.

I cant remember all the techy names for the equipment and software but what we basically had to play with was two music studios to play with. One to record live sounds and the other to make electronic music on a computer.

The participants were split up into two groups and made music. I went with the live group which included Brogan, Steph and Katie as well as Cathryn and Moira. Cathryn and Moira sung a duet together and gelled really well. It took a little bit of time for the others to show us what they could do. Steph and Katie showed us some great vocal.

Here is something Katie performed for with her acoustic guitar:

https://soundcloud.com/raelthing/hallelujah

I have some video of Moira and Cathryn singing which I will add later. While we were doing this the other group made ringtones for themselves.

I did a little interview with Brogan and Steph about what they were doing with the Cupar Youth Café. This was all done off the cuff so to speak so all of us were pretty nervous.

The Cupar Youth Café obviously does a great job for the young people in and around Cupar and needs to be supported. We need to support and encourage young people because they are the future of Scotland.

Here are some photos from the workshop:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We got a lot of very positive feed back including@

Happy :-)
Relaxed and happy
:)
I have enjoyed the experience and learned a lot
I really enjoyed it
I feel more educated on the technical side of music
Inspired, tired and full
Musical
Great to have the chance to see how music can be made
Liberated, more confident

All participants gave the workshop a 5 out of 5 for enjoyment.

So all in all another great workshop. This was going to be the last Unique Dyslexic Get Creative for this year. But we will be running one last one in partnership with Furniture Plus in the near future.

Plus we are starting to plan for an exhibition and party to celebrate and promote the work of all the participants who came to the workshops as well as work from artists and writers etc who have shared their work on our social media. Hopefully there will be some surprises in there as well. This is going to take place sometime in October.

Anyway that's enough from me. I will be making an audio version of the blog later this week. Many thanks for taking the time to read my blog. It is very much appreciated.