With just one day to go I can feel the excitement building for this year’s Sound and Music Summer School. I always notice the build up to the course… The phone calls start coming in, the messages asking whether things are possible start arriving and activity around the school increases. All this leads to the excitement increasing as I go about the final preparations for the course and I can’t wait for the Sound and Music 2016 Summer School to get going.

In just under 24 hours around 40 tutors and staff will arrive at the Purcell School to begin setting up and putting the final touches to their courses and from 2pm a large number of fantastically talented young composers will descend on the Purcell School with ideas bursting from their minds ready to be inspired by their tutors and the musicians surrounding them.

I am one of the technicians working for the musicians and young composers. I tend to look after the live sound end of things. My friend and colleague (Matti – The Technical Manager) will be taking care of the IT and studio side of the course – you’ll get to know him very well if you’re on the film music strand.

This is about the only picture of Martin that we have, he’s almost always on the wrong side of the camera!

Two years ago the photographer (Martin – if you see him, smile and wave for your new Facebook profile picture!) approached me with something he found challenging. He had a large number of photos which were on his camera (this was day 2) and he wanted to get them out to students and those pictured. We came up with this blog. Built at about 2am one morning.

The blog has been a great success and a large number of people wrote some brilliant articles for it about their work and their time on the course. Of course, Martin’s fabulous pictures also filled much of the site! We now tweet @samsummeruk and use the hashtag #SAMsummer16. Do follow us or have a look at what we’re tweeting on the feed on this website.

This year, I’m really looking forward to reading more articles written by musicians and the students on the course. Keep an eye out for them as the week progresses! Finally, just to really whet your appetite, here is a short video from last year’s course: