Disney World "You're Instrumental" Workshop

Last March my high school band took a Spring Break trip to Walt Disney World. While most of the days were spent riding rollercoasters or lounging on beaches, we also performed in Florida. Disney offers many classes and workshops for performing arts. The workshop my band participated in is called the "You're Instrumental" Workshop. We were given the chance to experience what it is like recording music for a movie or TV show.

Only the best of the best are hired to play in studio recording bands for movies. These musicians must be very trained at sight-reading. Sight-reading is when you are playing a piece of music for the first time and you have never seen it before. It is a hard skill to practice, so many musicians either have it or they don't. Bands that record music for movies do not get together and practice often. In fact, they do not get together to practice at all before the day of the recording. The musicians come in and rehearse the music once or twice and then they record it. This is why sight-reading is such an important skill. The music is not given to the performers before the day of the recording, so they do not have a chance to practice it at all before coming together with the rest of the band.

Through Disney's "You're Instrumental" Workshop, my band experienced what it was like working under these conditions. When we walked into the room many chairs were set up with signs indicating where each instrument section should sit. The director running our workshop introduced himself and gave a brief talk once we were settled. For the first hour and a half, we ran through five or six well-known tunes from popular Disney movies. We only played each song three times at most, so things moved along fairly quickly. In between reps of each song, the director pointed out four or five things that we should focus on and try to improve for the next run through. After the first half of the workshop we took a short break. Upon returning, the director announced the selection we would be recording to sync up with a clip from a Disney movie. We would be playing a scene from "The Lion King" in which Simba ventures down into the gorge and the buffalo start to stream in. We rehearsed the piece around four times and it improved each time. Finally, once the director was pleased with a recording, the professionals played the clip up on a projector with our music in the background. The recording sounded great and it was very fun to make. To my pleasure, every participant was sent home with a copy of the clip. The workshop was extremely entertaining and helped many students understand what it was like being a professional recording musician.

If you are interested in taking your band to a Disney's "You're Instrumental" Workshop, check out this page: http://www.disneyyouth.com/our-programs/performing-arts/sp/workshops/program/dpa-workshops-youre-instrumental-wdw/#categories-workshops.