Rainhat - Singer/songwriter

New songs, finally!

Sami — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:17:51 +0000

I recorded two new songs! At last! Let me know what you think!

I’m still having problems with my wrists, so I guess I really shouldn’t be playing too much. They seem to be getting better though, just very slowly. It’s quite frustrating to not be able to just pick up a guitar and play as much as I would like to, but at least I have plenty of time to write new songs.

Suggestions?

Sami — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:43:16 +0000

I’ve been messing around with the appearance of this site for a few days now, and I think I’ve managed to get it to work the way I want to. I got stuck quite a few times, as there is quite a lot of code to look through, but I’m quite happy with the result.

So, do you have any suggestions on how to improve this website? Is there anything you would like to see? Is something weird? Is something missing? Let me know!

Work underway

Sami — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:57:00 +0000

I am finally done with school, and back in business! I have a whole bunch of songs to record, and I thought I’d kick off this return to Rainhatness by redesigning my website. So for the next few days things are going to look a bit messy in the sidebar. I will try to get everything good and ready as soon as I can. And then, the world’s my oyster!

Time flies

Sami — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Rainhat has been sitting on ice for a while now, I’ve been too busy with school to have time to do much else. I have way more to do this semester than I did before the summer break. This summer was also quite hectic. My girlfriend and I got married at the end of August, and organizing everything for the wedding was pretty crazy. But it turned out great in the end. We had a great wedding and a nice party afterwards with good food, good music and dancing with friends and family.

But holy crap, does time fly… Has it already been five months since the last post? Wow.

School has been both interesting and a pain in the ass. The bad planning and lack of communication annoys me, but there are many good things too. I just came back from three weeks of intership at a music school, where I was teaching students of all levels from 8-year old beginners to 30-year olds who made me feel like I probably should practice more. I got to teach both on flute and guitar, which was interesting. I haven’t taught students that young on guitar before, and though it was a bit of a challenge trying to remember all the very basic stuff you need to keep an eye on, it was loads fun!

Overall, I think the biggest challenge right now is just that – trying to remember that I need to keep an eye on all the basics. I don’t mean to sound conceited, but after having played on a more or less professional level for quite a while, you just start taking the basic stuff for granted. Things like knowing how to hold the flute, how to get a sound out of it and pressing all the right buttons just come automatically, you don’t really have to think about them anymore. But when you’re 9 years old and just started playing a month ago, those things aren’t quite so obvious. I really had to remind myself of that and remember to keep an eye on fingers, posture and other things. By the end of the internship I think I was doing quite well. My mentor was a teacher who had been teaching there for about 35 years, and thanks to him interrupting me every once in a while to give me pointers and advice, I think I really learned a lot! I wish my other mentors did that too. School is all good and fine, but there’s no better place for learning how to teach than at a school where you’re actually teaching. And having someone give you advice in a real life situation is absolutely invaluable.

Only 8 more months to go until I graduate as a teacher. Phew…

School and stuff

Sami — Mon, 17 May 2010 00:22:05 +0000

Whoopsie, I just noticed I haven’t posted anything in almost two months. How did that happen? School has kept me not so much busy as just preoccupied. The course I’m on is so weird. It was supposed to be a full time course, but it really isn’t. I’ve had about three lessons per week on average, barely anything at all to do for weeks at the time, and then one or two weeks that suddenly throw so much stuff at me I barely have time to sleep. And then back to doing almost nothing…
The classes and the disposition of the subjects is really strange too. I’m studying to be a flute teacher, so one would think that flute methodology is a fairly important class. It’s about how to teach the flute specifically, how to teach specific techniques, how to plan the courses, etc. But no. I had 5 lessons this semester, and that’s it. 5 hours. The only class that has actually been running throughout the whole semester is conducting class. Conducting is fun and all, and good to know something about if I ever need to lead an orchestra or a wind band or something, I guess, but I’m not a conductor. I’m not studying to be a conductor. I’m a flute teacher. I will be teaching one or two students at the time. So how come I have 15 x 90 minutes of conducting this semester, but only 5 x 60 minutes of flute teaching class? It confuses me.
Research methodology is a fun one too. We had an introduction in February, where the teacher asked us to come up with ideas on what to write an essay about for our third semester. At the next lesson, she gaves us a stack of papers about 1 inch thick and told us to read it by the next lesson, which was planned for the end of April. Aaaaalrighty. If I just wanted to learn everything on my own, I could have done that without going back to college… This is such a weird course, and so utterly disorganized. I guess I’m supposed to be a certified teacher by the end of it, but right now it feels like that is going to be on paper only. I don’t really feel all that much more competent now than I did when I started…

Brand new song

Sami — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:19:29 +0000

I’ve been quite busy with school for the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t had quite as much time to spend on making new videos as I would have wanted, but now I finally managed to finish one. It’s a brand new song called “From the corner of my eye” that I wrote a few weeks ago. Check it out!

As a part of my education, I’m doing a kind of internship at the local music school and teach music to little kids for about two hours every friday. It’s both and challenging, I like it a lot. I also have to do a full time internship for two weeks, and both observe a teacher at the music school and see how they teach, as well as teach a bit myself. I’m half-ways through the second week of this right now. It’s loads of fun, but it really does a number on your brain to do it full time. I normally start working at around 1 or 2 pm and work until about 8 pm every night, and holy crap is my brain tired when I get home. It’s really quite exhausting to work with kids and to stay focused and teach for a full day. But I like it. It would be awesome if I could find a job as a teacher after I’m done with this course. Part time teaching and part time performing would be about as awesome as it can get.