This week is the week of our final workshop, but we managed to get an extra session to iron out any problems and make sure the workshop will flow as smoothly as possible on Tuesday. We planned out exactly what we need for the session, when we need to get there, and other important factors. We went through the plan again with the tutor to ensure everything made sense and got rid of unnecessary parts that the students don’t need or we might have time to do.
Strengths
In this lesson, we managed to make our plan even more refined. We found out that our session had been shortened to only an hour, so we had too much content for the workshop. To fix this, we took out things in the plan that would take up a lot of time and were not the most necessary thing for their song, such as the guitar. We also removed the warm-up and warm-down games as these were taking up quite a proportion of our time. Instead, our workshop is now planned as follows:
START
Introduce ourselves and the workshop
WORKSHOP
Drums
- give some genre drum beat examples first
- pick “drum machine”
- choose drum sounds
- make drum beat
- press record and record 4 bars (explain where to find four bars)
- go to arrangement view and loop drum beat
Keys
- choose smart keyboard
- pick a sound you like from the keyboards section
- do dice game:
- we put all the chords on the board, each chord having a number
- each student rolls a dice 4 times to determine chords
- students can change rhythm and chord structure but can only use each chord once (if they don’t have duplicates)
- record in chords
Bass
- choose smart bass
- pick a sound you like from the bass selection
- pick notes that relate to the chords (eg if used an em, use a note in the em section)
- find a general melody and rhythm
- record in bassline
Lyrics
- give out lyrics from a popular song and ask to find:
- fave phrases
- repetition
- rhyming
- alliteration
- tom asks a question and explains how to write lyrics
- go into writing lyrics, use title references
- we go round helping students individually until they come up with 6-8 lines
- we help give lyrics a melody and rhythm
- record in on iPad
- if students don’t want to record they can add more melodies that relate to the lyrics melody
END
- ask students if they want to share their work
- share the work from our group iPad
THROUGHOUT
- make sure before recording they press triangle and line to bring the recorder back to the first beat
- make sure everything is quantized
- make sure everything is on c major key
- turn volume down on iPads when we are explaining the next steps
- walk around listening to students work whilst they are working on iPads
WHAT WE NEED
- dice
- iPads
- pens
- lyrics sheet
Also this week, we have created a resource sheet that explains certain parts of the session like the chance composition and lyric writing sections. This makes it easier for both us and the students as they will have information right infant of them some don’t have to explain certain things many times. For example, the chance composition section contains the dice numbers that correlate to the chords, and the lyric writing section contains the reference words the students can use for their inspiration. Also on the sheet is the lyrics from ABBA’s ‘Mamma Mia’, which we are using for the students to analyse. This is because it contains a lot of easy to spot rhyming, alliteration, repetition and the phrases are interesting. Here is a photo of the worksheets will give out:
Targets For The Workshop
-Successfully deliver the workshop to a group of students and ensure they enjoy the session.
-Have the class create a short piece on Garage Band that they are proud of.
-Be able to control the group and keep them engaged.