For this project we will all be hosting community music workshops for different local groups around the area. For this project we have all been split up into teams of three, inside of these groups our job is to organise a workshop to deliver to the community. It is important to have excellent organisation and speech skills if we are to host a group workshop, as most of the people we are teaching won’t understand anything about music therefore we must be able to explain music in a simple and understandable format. Each music workshop may be unique to the others, for example one group within our college year is having a community music workshop which teaches singing and vocals to people, whereas another workshop within our college is teaching how to write music on garage band.
My Group
In our community music workshop we will be teaching people how to write music with 3 very important elements of music, which are; rhythm, harmony and melody. We are teaching people these 3 core elements to music first as they are used in almost every piece of music, therefore this session will gift them the knowledge to write their own music. We will be teaching our community music session on garage band as it is very watered down and simple to understand, meaning we will be able to teach people how to use garage band in out session as well. Other DAW’s such as Logic, Cubase and Ableton are very advanced and may be complicated to teach within an hour and a half, therefore we chose to avoid teaching these DAW’s within our group. Garage band was also the superior alternative because it is accessible on Ipads, therefore we could transport the Ipads from college to our workshop venue and hand them out. Most other DAW’s are not on mobile, meaning it would be very difficult to have access to these softwares within our session.
We will be teaching our session to a community called the ‘Common space group’ this is a youth group, meaning we will be delivering this session to people around our own age. The people teaching our workshop group include; myself, Adam .S and Tia .T. Each one of us within the group will focus on leading the different sections within our group, for example Adam will be teaching the group the rhythm section of our workshop as he has the most experience with rhythm as a drummer. Therefore he will explain to the community how to make a drum beat within garage band, and provide examples of different styles of drum beats e.g. dance, pop, electronic and rock music drum patterns. He will have to provide a clear explanation of how to create a beat for the group so that it is easy to understand for unexperienced musicians. Below this text is a table which will show which team member is leading each different section within our workshop. The total time we have to teach our workshop is between an hour to an hour and a half, this is a very short amount of time to manage a workshop. Meaning we must manage our time efficiently during this time so that we don’t run over the time or under it.
| Team Member | Section |
| Tia. T | Harmony |
| Adam. S | Rhythm |
| Isaac. H | Melody |
| Tia. T | Games / Icebreakers |
The Plan
It is important before going into the session that we have a detailed plan of what we are going to do within the time we have for the workshop, this will avoid us finishing the workshop early or running out of things to do with the group. We also have to be aware of not trying to have too many different activities within the workshop as that will cause us to run overtime, therefore resulting in us not being able to finish the workshop in time we have it for.
Introduction and Icebreaker (15 minutes)
We will start our session with a short ice breaker game called follow the leader, for more information on this game visit the ‘Community Games’ heading on my community music introduction page on digital space. We have chosen to start the session with a game as it creates a more relaxed environment for everyone and warms everyone up for the session. As a lot of people can feel stressed or uncomfortable in new environments it is our job when hosting this session to make everyone feel happy and comfortable, this game also teaches people rhythm skills and critical listening skills which are both important attributes within the music industry. Critical listening is important in music production it will help you hear small mistakes in your music so that you can correct them, critical listening can also help you play music by ear which is a great skills when it comes to performing music or working in a band. Because if you can learn music by ear it become a lot easier to learn new songs quickly. Rhythm skills are just as important as it will allow you to play in time with the music and also compose more interesting rhythms in you song writing. Meaning this game is also relevant to the topic of the workshop, the ice breaker game will last around a time of 10 minuets which will give us a lot of time to conduct the rest of the session. After the ice breaker game is finished we will all introduce our selves to the group, for example we will say something like “Hi guys, my name is Isaac and today we will be teaching you how to write a song within this session”. Then we after Adam and Tia have said their names we ill go around in a circle where everyone will say their names in order to get to know everyone better before we start the session.
Garage Band Rhythm Section (15 mins)
After the introduction to the session is complete we will begin the rhythm section of the music, this is where we will teach the group how to make a drum beat for the backing track of their songs. This part of the workshop will be taught by Adam, as he has the most experience with rhythm as he is a drummer. To begin this section Adam will guide the group to Garageband and tell them how to access the drum pad plug in which is available on Garageband. We are starting our music production workshop with creating a drum beat because it will help them play in time with the tempo of the music without the use of a metronome. Once everyone is on the drum pad plug in Adam will talk about how you can make different styles of drum beats (e.g. rock, pop, hip-hop and dance), we will show them different drum styles to give the group more creative freedom in the music that they are making. Garagebands drum pad is a vey useful tool for beginners as it is impossible to make a dum beat out of time, because the rhythm of the drums are fixed to the beginning of every beat. Therefore in this section we will mostly be helping students make a more interesting drum arrangement and maybe explain what the different drums are on the pad and why their use in popular music. As giving the students context to the drums and how they are often used in pop music may help them when they are making their own drum beat. When everyone is done with they drum beats we will then teach them how to record it for 8 bars, which is the length of which everyones music will be at the end of this workshop. Once the drum beat is recorded we will go into the project template and teach the how to loop it via the channel settings, it is important to loop the drum beat so that when we are recording over it that it repeats instead of cutting into silence. If the drum beat is not looped it may cause some people to lose time when recording their instruments.
Harmony Section (15 mins)
Once everyone in the session has a basic drum beat we will teach the group how to compose a harmony, the instrument on garage band we will use to teach harmony will be the acoustic guitar plug in. We chose this section on guitar instead of piano because in pop music guitar is more commonly used to play the chords, therefore to make this song writing workshop relatable to pop music we will use this rule. We are using pop music techniques in our song writing to make the music sound more similar to popular music in todays charts, we are doing this to make the workshop more interested in song writing as the majority of them will most likely listen to pop music. This section of the session will be taught by Tia as she is the guitarist of our group therefore she is more experienced with the guitar, however the guitar plug in on garage band has a chord tabs page where you can press a single button to play a specific chord. For example there will be a button that says A minor, and all you have to do to play that chord is press the button. As this is simple to understand, this is what we will be teaching this part of the session on. To make the songwriting simple we will only allow everyone to compose in the key of C major as it is all white notes making it very easy to write in, even for beginners. Tia will demonstrate to the group multiple pop formulas for chord progressions such as I, V, IV. Teaching them these formulas will act as a guide to help them compose a catchy chord progression. Once everyone has created a chord progression they are happy with they will record over the drum beat, the drum beat in the background will help the group record their chords in time. However if the chords are out of time we will go into the channel strips piano roll and drag it in time for them. Just like last time we will make sure everyone has looped there recording for every 8 bars so that it does not stop playing after 8 bars.
Melody Section (15 mins)
One the group has both their harmony and melody we will guide them on how to compose a melody over the track, this part of the workshop will be lead by myself. I will start this part of the session by explaining what a melody is and what role it plays in the music, for example the melody is often the lead musical line in the music that we listen to such as vocals. This will help those un-familar with melody a brief understanding of the topic. We will be recording melody into our tracks via the smart piano plug in, we can not use the same chord tab page for melody as it will make the music sound messy as it will have 2 different chord progressions going on. Therefore we must switch the octave arrangement on Garageband so that we can all play each individual note on the piano. After explaining what melody is I will guide everyone to the piano instrument where we will be composing our melodies. When we arrive at the page I will show various examples of melodies e.g. ascending and descending so that the workshop group understand the different arrangements of melodies. To make the melody writing simpler we will tell everyone to play in the scale of C major, they might not understand what a scale is yet so we will just tell them to only play the white keys. This will avoid people playing off key when writing their melody making the songwriting much easier. We will then tell everyone to begin making their melody while we also help them along the way, we will all try to correct any mistakes such as; clashing notes, off time notes and off key notes within the music by going around the group and giving everyone live feedback. When everyone has a melody we will then record it into garage band via the same technique we used before, we will also once again loop it.
Vocals or Another Instrument (10 mins)
After the melody is recorded in we will give the group the chance to either record in some vocals over the music or record in a fourth instrument, giving the group this choice will allow them to have more control over their instrumental arrangement in their song. Once everyone has decided we will split the room into two teams, people who want to add vocals and people that would like to add a fourth instrument. For each group we will have a leader who will explain to the group how to progress their music. I will be leading the people who want to record in vocals , therefore I will guide them on how to access the microphone within Garageband. Once everyone is on the microphone I will explain the different types of parameters such as; dynamic input / output and pitch. I am going to avoid talking about features such as compression as they are for more advanced workshops and we will have no need for this parameter in our song writing workshop. Before they record the audio we will make sure they have a set of lyrics to sing along too, to make sure the music sounds more organised and professional. To help people come up with lyrics we will give the group a word of theme to base their lyrics around, we did this in a song writing workshop we did in college which was the inspiration for this idea. This will help people decide what their song is to be about and how they will write the lyrics. As the song is only going to be four bars everyone in the group only needs around 4 lines of lyrics or maybe even less, making this lyrics writing fairly easy and fun for everyone. Once everyone is comfortable with the lyrics they have written we will record it into Garageband, all people within the workshop have freedom to create lyrics in the style of any genre they would like. As Garageband struggles to pick up voices on the microphone I will instruct the group to turn up the dynamic input of the microphone so that it captures their voice clearly.
If no one would like to sing everyone will focus on adding a fourth instrument, this group will be lead by Tia. The fourth instrument in the workshop will focus on adding more depth into the music e.g. synth leads or more complex harmonies. For this section of the workshop the community will have full control over what instrument they want to include in the workshop, this could be synths, woodwinds or even strings. We will begin this part of the section by explaining what different roles your fourth instrument can have in the music and what techniques they can use implement them into the music. For example they could bring more depth to their music by adding a synth pad playing the root note of their chords into their music. After we have talked about what roles their new instrument can have in their music we will give them the chance to scroll through the various instruments on app and chose which instrument they want in their music. Luckily the group we are going to be delivering the workshop to it very small, meaning we can give every student enough guidance to add a fourth instrument into the music. As I may be helping people record in vocals, for this section Adam will be helping Tia with the fourth instrument section of the workshop. He will be helping with this part of the workshop as it will be much more difficult to manage as the topic is more musically complex, meaning the group will most likely need help with getting their fourth instrument right. Once everyone is done recording their fourth instrument into their song we will reunite the group together so that we can conclude the session.
Share (5 mins)
Once the group is all together we will conclude the session by having everyone share their final song with the group, however if they are not comfortable with sharing with the group then they do not have to. As pushing people into sharing their music may make them seem anxious, in this group we want to make everyone feel happy and safe therefore we won’t push anybody to share if they do not want to. However everyone that wants the group to hear their music will play it out loud one at a time, this will help us all clearly hear the music instead of everyone playing it at once. We will congratulate everyone on their song writing with no negative feedback, this will avoid hurting peoples feelings. And congratulating people on what they have done well may inspire them to continue making music which is the main goal of our workshop. Once everyone has shared their music we will thank everyone for participating in our workshop and say goodbye to everyone before leaving. That is the full plan for what we want to do inside of our workshop, this will take around a minimum of an hour and 15 minutes.