The 2015 Bill Ellis drum award is a very special award that acknowledges the overall achievement and enthusiasm of one drum kit student from Oxygen Tuition.
This award is carefully selected as it recognises a student’s overall focus, improvement and consistency in their music endeavours over the year.
Daniel Valitutti was last year’s deserving recipient of the Bill Ellis award after taking on a whole new level of drumming challenges. Working with his teacher Hilton Winiecki, Daniel embarked on a new direction with his drumming lessons by accepting the challenge to learn new styles and techniques such as Latin Drumming and some advanced Funk drumming. In order to embark on these styles Daniel worked extremely hard on improving his music reading, hand and feet independence and general knowledge on music styles. It has been an ongoing learning process for Daniel who is continuing in 2016 on improving on these styles.
Daniel started drumming lessons 6 years ago and has attributed his development in his playing to constantly learning and tackling new material and styles. He also enjoys discovering new styles of drumming that he did not know existed.
Like most students, Daniel has gone through periods where his playing progress had slowed down, but he recognised that help with any of his struggles is always on hand with his teacher and his positive attitude towards accepting new challenges has made a big difference.
Last year’s drum concerts ended with Daniel performing the drum solo chart ‘Streets of Cuba’ which highlighted all the great Latin drumming that he had been working on. Daniel said that this was one of the ‘most fun, yet challenging’ pieces he had learnt so far. Daniel is looking forward to continuing discovering new drumming styles in 2016 with his lessons and is currently studying ‘songwriting – from a drummers perspective’ with his teacher. Daniel is also looking forward to developing his band playing and is working towards starting gigs soon.
Well Done Daniel, very well deserved.
Hilton Winiecki