We learn all of our pieces through a method called kuchi shoga. (I like to call it kuchi coo. <3) This means that all of our music is learned by repeating phonetic sounds that imitate the sound of the taiko. So a written version of our piece as said with kuchi shoga may look something like:
Don tsuku don tsuku don kon ka don
Don don don don don kon ka don
Very clear, yes? We don't keep any written music for this reason.
We also like to get creative when talking about the musicality of our pieces. Though we all have musical backgrounds, we choose to speak in non-music theory terms to explain our musical intentions. During practice today, we talked about how to build while repeating a pattern, and Pac-Man stormed into our practice! And he brought his posse of tiny Pac-Men with him!
We put taiko on hold and played arcade games for the rest of practice.
