Bringing 100 People Together with Boomwhackers – Compass Changing Lives Away Day
Bringing 100 People Together with Boomwhackers – Compass Changing Lives Away Day
In September 2026, Unbeatable Energy joined around 100 members of the Compass Changing Lives team for their Away Day at Ringwood Hall in Chesterfield.
Compass does incredibly important work supporting the mental health and well-being of children and young people. The Away Day gave the whole team an opportunity to come together, reflect on their shared values and enjoy some time together away from their day-to-day work.
100 people making music together
The musical part of the day began with all 100 delegates taking part in an hour-long Boomwhacker team-building session.
Our Boomwhacker experiences have been developing musically, increasingly bringing together the instrument with influences from West African music – something we’re now exploring across our corporate, education and community work.
For the Compass session, one of our established Boomwhacker arrangements was combined with singing – using a song from Mali associated with the Sunu rhythm, taught to me by Hans Sutton.
It created a rather magical moment. The different Boomwhacker parts gradually came together across the room underneath the singing, with 100 people creating the music together – and clearly having a lot of fun in the process.
From Boomwhackers to African drums
After lunch, the focus moved from Boomwhackers to djembes, with two smaller African drumming workshops during the afternoon.
It made for a great combination: the entire organisation participating together through Boomwhackers in the morning, followed by the energy and immediacy of African drumming in smaller groups later in the day.
The Compass team were an incredibly warm and enthusiastic group to work with, and it was a real pleasure to contribute to a day centred around the people behind such important work.
Could this work at your next Away Day or conference?
Unbeatable Energy provides interactive Boomwhacker, African drumming, Samba drumming and percussion experiences for corporate Away Days, conferences, team-building events and staff celebrations throughout the UK.
Sessions can range from a short, high-energy conference icebreaker to a longer team-building experience. Boomwhackers are particularly effective when you want to bring a large conference audience together, with hundreds of people able to participate simultaneously.
We’d be delighted to discuss your event and explore how African drumming could work for your team.
Unbeatable Energy is now a YouTube Partner!
Unbeatable Energy is now a YouTube Partner!
I’m delighted to share a milestone that has taken a long time to achieve: Unbeatable Energy is now officially a YouTube Partner!
For many years, I’ve used my YouTube channel to share African drumming, djembe tutorials, Boomwhacker ideas and highlights from some of the workshops and musical projects I’ve been involved with.
Over the past couple of years in particular, I’ve been developing the tuition side of the channel, creating more resources for people who want to learn African drumming, explore different rhythms and develop their playing.
And gradually, people have been watching.
The long road to 4,000 watch hours
To qualify for full YouTube Partner status, my channel needed to achieve 4,000 qualifying public watch hours within a 12-month period.
It certainly didn’t happen overnight.
At times I became far too interested in the analytics, checking the figures almost every day and watching the total creep upwards. There were periods when it seemed to stall completely, and more than once I genuinely wondered whether I was ever going to get there.
Eventually, around July, I decided to stop looking.
Instead, I concentrated on what was happening in the real world – delivering workshops, playing, developing my own musicianship and working on new ideas.
And something rather lovely happened while I wasn’t watching the analytics.
People kept watching the videos.
My existing back catalogue continued accumulating views and watch time. Then last week, almost on a whim, I opened the Earn section of YouTube Studio and discovered that I’d finally done it.
Even more remarkably, I later found that YouTube had sent me the congratulations email only around eight hours before I happened to look!
After spending so long watching those figures, I’d finally reached the milestone when I wasn’t watching at all.
Building something for the future
Becoming a YouTube Partner means that the channel can now generate some income through advertising and YouTube Premium when people watch my videos.
I’m under no illusions that this is suddenly going to provide my retirement fund! But what excites me is the possibility of the channel beginning to support its own development.
Over the years I’ve built up a substantial library of free African drumming tuition, rhythms, techniques, Boomwhacker activities and other percussion ideas. If that existing material can now generate some income, however modestly at first, that can be invested back into developing the channel and creating new projects.
And I have plenty of ideas about where I’d like to take it next.
One project I’m particularly excited about is developing my Boomwhacker work with a much stronger connection to the African musical traditions that have influenced so much of what I do. I’ve been experimenting with ways of bringing Boomwhackers together with African rhythms, drumming and other musical ideas, and there is a lot more I want to explore.
I’m also increasingly interested in using the channel to meet and talk to some of the master musicians who have devoted their lives to the djembe and West African music. Some conversations are already beginning to happen, and I hope to bring interviews and musical encounters with some extraordinary artists to the channel in the future.
Alongside that, the tuition will continue. I’m currently developing videos looking more closely at djembe technique, as well as continuing to share rhythms and ideas that people can take into their own playing.
Why not watch my latest djembe tuition video, ‘Think Up’, which looks at improving your tone and slap technique?
Watch and support the channel
You can explore all my latest djembe tuition, African drumming, Boomwhacker and percussion videos on the Unbeatable Energy YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@unbeatableenergy
If you enjoy the videos and would like to help me develop more free tuition and new musical projects, you can also support the channel using Super Thanks on YouTube. Every contribution, however small, helps me invest more time and resources into developing what comes next.
Thank you for watching
Ultimately, none of this milestone happens without people choosing to watch.
So a huge thank you to everybody who has watched, subscribed, commented, shared a video or learned something from the channel over the years – and particularly to those who have supported the growing tuition side of the channel over the past couple of years.
Four thousand watch hours may look like a number on an analytics screen. In reality, they represent thousands of people spending their time watching, playing and learning alongside me.
That’s what makes becoming a YouTube Partner feel particularly special.
And now that I’ve finally reached this milestone, I’m really looking forward to seeing where I can take the channel next.
