Holding a doom metal workshop for children under 13...

[B36arin]

Hey guys,

I play in a doom metal band(www.facebook.com/hamferd) in The Faroe Islands, and we've been reasonably successful locally for the last 2 years. Successful enough that we've been asked to have an educational workshop about our music(doom) by the biggest local youth centre here. The target audience is children under 13. We're expected to entertain the youths for about three hours. How cool is that?!

Three of the band members are going, me and the other guitarist(main songwriters) and the drummer(who is also very involved). I'm really looking forward to it, but holding a workshop for an audience that young isn't exactly what we're most used to doing. None of us has any teaching experience. We're going to introduce ourselves and our backgrounds, and then tell the kids about what we usually do when writing music, recording music, touring etc. I'm probably going to bring one of of the mix sessions from our EP to go through quickly, and we're bringing our amps and instruments for the kids to try out. But three hours is a pretty long time to entertain children, so we need to be pretty damn fascinating. I'm pretty sure that there are people here with teaching experience, and some of you guys without teaching experience probably have great ideas about what we could do to entertain the kids. Any ideas?

tl;dr: We're having a doom metal workshop for kids under 13, we have to entertain them for three hours and I'd love to hear some suggestions about what the kids might find fascinating that we haven't thought about.

 

[updog]

are they going to be just some random kids or kids who are actually interested in metal music?

sounds like it could be fun, just remember to try and hold up a positive atmosphere even though metal is serious business just be friendly and look friendly and maybe some of those kids will start listening to metal music through you guys. i bet being a metal hero to some kid would feel awesome

i think a high-gained guitar would be what most of the kids would love to try out, i remember from that age that i never really got to try one with decent distortion and i imagine a lot of kids today are like that as well.

this probably didn't help but i think this sounds awesome

 

[B36arin]

Thanks for the input!

The kids are hopefully going to be interested in the music. According to the woman who booked us for the workshop the kids mention us a lot. There are going to be two other workshops going on at the same time(a graphic workshop and a dance workshop). The workshops are free and voluntary.

We're just going to be ourselves. Our music is very serious, but we're just normal guys like everyone else(probably a bit sillier), and the most important thing is that the kids have fun. I still remember how much I loved the tone I got when I bought my first ever pedal(Ibanez Smashbox) and used it through my Fender Twin Reverb(no I'm not THAT spoiled, my dad picked it up for $40 at a flea market). It took me a couple of years to realize that it didn't really sound that good. I'm going by the things which I'd have liked when I was 12-13, that's where I got the idea to bring the amps. But apart from that I need to brainstorm some more. I'm also trying to figure out a way to make earplugs seem "cool". I don't believe in scaring the kids to use earplugs, but it's probably the most important thing to teach kids who want to start playing metal.

 

[Sloan]

Do an entire music history thing and teach the kids about the DOOM genre, it's history, the influential bands etc... you can all mention your favorite artists/albums etc... also try to go through some other genres so kids don't think they should only listen to doom all the time. lol

 

[egan.]

I'm filing this under "Things that do not happen in the US."

 

[B36arin]

The music history part isn't a bad idea. We'd just have to be careful with it, because I can imagine that most kids could get pretty bored with that after a short time... I'm trying to come up with ideas to get the children involved with practical activities, because very few kids under 13 have the attention span to listen to a few guys talking about doom metal for a couple of hours.

 

[B36arin]

Egan, it pretty rare here too... I can't believe that we've been asked, but we have quite strong connections to the youth centre which probably helped us a lot(several of us used to hang out there when we were kids, our rehearsal space is there and most of the guys have been in bands that have rehearsed there for many years).