Sunday 19 March 2017

Songwriting Collaboration



Mrs. Lowe and Mrs. Atcheson were working on developing a wacky idea to write a song about Winnipeg with Room 9 in their study of Winnipeg.  Mrs. Lowe and her students developed lists of ideas and facts and grouped them.



 Mrs. Lowe asked if we could somehow take these ideas and make them into a song. As we were thinking about the music and ideas, Mrs. Lowe remembered a song she liked by the band, The Weakerthans, called I Hate Winnipeg.  She played it for me and right away I thought, "Let's write verses for how we LOVE Winnipeg."  Almost immediately I started to pull phrases from the student ideas and wrote several verses.  I figured out the chords and developed a rough track on Garageband.  The next week I brought the song to the kids and they got excited and we started to develop their own verse.  After several attempts to make words fit, we felt it was good and then started to rehearse it to learn all the words.  We also want to add some body percussion and rhythm to the song and we are working on that as well.  Mrs. Lowe and her class also plan to make a video.




Just the other day I pulled a few kids to record a rough copy of the song with their voices.  There were a lot of giggles as they learned about the process of recording.  We have to wear the headphones to hear the music and we can also hear our voices when we speak into the microphone.  We also had to practice not singing too loud or it can distort the sound and make it fuzzy.  Some other things we have to work on are matching our voices, hitting the right notes, and singing in the beat.   We look forward to singing our song live during music listening in May.



We hope you enjoy our song about Winnipeg!

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