The good people at Sounds Fresh and Kent Music Service have commissioned a brand new piece for you to perform. Arranged and directed by Paul Sartin (of Belshazzar’s Feast, Bellowhead and Faustus), the piece is called Changing Landscapes.

To join in come to the free workshop day on 14th May at Charles Dickens School, Broadstairs Road, CT10 2RL.

Bring your instrument and your lunch for a day of fun folk music making between 10am and 4pm.

To reserve your place email workshops@kent-music.com.

Kent Music Service run a folk group throughout the year – you can read more about Sounds Fresh by clicking here.

Click here for the 14th May folk workshop poster

Last year in February we ran a tutor training weekend support by a grant from the Musician’s Benevolent Fund. This was a really exciting venture for Shooting Roots: our first funded training project for a few years. It was a chance to secure quality training for our tutors and hopefully set us up for the years to come.

We invited Paul Wilson (Wren Music) and Joe Broughton (Albion Band, UFQ, Birmingham Conservatoire) to act as mentors for us during the weekend.

Our overall aim was to develop a workshop practise that encourages excellence from our participants and tutors whilst remaining fun for everyone in a mixed ability setting. This was two pronged: a focus on good practise within workshopping as well as looking at the specific challenge of bringing challenging material into a mixed setting.

During and after the event we collated lots of feedback from tutors. The response was overwhelmingly positive: every tutor took something away from the weekend which helped over the coming months and would be interested in a similar opportunity again.

We hope to run more projects like this in future. In the meantime we will be focusing on sharing the skills already accumulated within our tutor group. The first opportunity for this will be our tutor training weekend coming up this June in readiness for this summer’s festivals. Exciting!

If you want to read our evaluation report please click on the link below.

Raising the Game Evaluation Report

Here at SR-HQ we’re just getting to grips with what is coming in the months ahead. Steph having fun chatting to all and sundry about folk music and in the process she’s discovered that Shooting Roots has a vast army of adults who might like to be involved supporting Shooting Roots.

As a result, Steph has decided to start an adult supporters newsletter. It will contain a brief update of what we’re doing (similar to what you’ll find on the blog) and when needed, requests for help: could you bring us craft supplies to Towersey? Help us with lunch at our tutors weekend? Help us get our myriad tutors from one end of the country to another?

If you’re interested in joining then please email Steph. You can reach her at steph.west @ shootingroots.org