Kingdom Brass have announced they will be sponsoring the inaugural SBBA Youth Percussion Finals, offering the three youth prizewinners a private lesson with percussion star Simone Rebello.

Open Section

SBBA are including a percussion section alongside the normal brass solos and ensembles. An open section will take place on Sunday, February 7th, for percussionists of all ages, rather than in specific age groups.

The best '21 and under', '16 and under' and '12 and under' player in the open competition will all be offered an invitation to receive a lesson from Simone.

Simone will be travelling to Scotland in August to work closely with the young percussion players from Kingdom and other bands.

This year has seen us launch our Percussion Academy, and it made perfect sense for us to offer some time with Simone to tutor the best young percussionists in ScotlandKingdom Brass

Perfect sense

Kingdom Brass Youth Chairman, Lee Bathgate, told 4BR: "This year has seen us launch our Percussion Academy, and it made perfect sense for us to offer some time with Simone to tutor the best young percussionists in Scotland. We’re very happy to support SBBA by sponsoring the youth prizes."

Exciting time

Lee continued: "We’re running three percussion workshops this year, and they’ll be open to all young percussionists in our area. On top of that we’re going to be running five brass workshops, and a residential course, so it’s a busy but very exciting time for our young players."

The next brass workshop will be on Saturday, March 6th, when Belgian cornet star, Raf Van Looveren, flies over to work with the youth band.