In this Roland Champion School case study, Harvey Goodman from St Peter’s School talks about his experiences of using Roland Cube amplifiers and some looping technologies with his guitar students from Years 9 – 13. Harvey picks up the story …

All the students that took part in this year’s RCS project had some experience of playing the guitar and were following the GCSE  Music/ BTEC Level 3 courses. Students began by learning about chord progressions and used classroom music sequencing software in the process to understand how certain chords would work together. 

The students were asked to compose their own chord scheme in a style of music which suited them. They then played their chord scheme into the Roland Cube amplifiers and improvised melodies to fit over each repetition of their looped, chordal accompaniment. The quality of the melodic responses from all students was seen and heard to improve as the chords looped around over again. In addition, some students also played parts of published pop/rock songs and played the chords then the melody over the top of the looped chords.

All students found the amplifiers motivating to work with not only through playing melodies over their looped chord schemes but through adding quality effects to their electric guitars. Some students changed effect to add variety over the repetitive loops.

In the main the students learnt about how chords work well together and then how to compose a melody and keep it in time with the looped chordal backing. Some improved their improvisatory skills too.

From a teaching point of view I learnt that looping is a great way to encourage students to learn about chord progressions and that it seems like a good way of developing improvisation skills. Following this project I feel it would be good to purchase some Boss RC-50 or RC-300 Loop Station devices to open up the world of looping to a wider audience of music students at school beyond the guitarists and allow more students, like vocalists for example, to develop these skills. It was clear from our RCS project last year, which involved a wider range of students, that the use of the Roland electronic drum kit diminished the achievement gap between the highest and lowest attaining students and I’m sure that purchasing the Loop Stations in the future would see a similar effect.