Practice Time!

Here is me trying out all the things I learnt from the previous post. Singing The Only Exception by Paramore! Enjoy!

Pushing My Guitar Skills

For my final piece I would have liked to perform my piece on piano, but I have been unable to have enough access to a piano to practice enough to learn to be able to sing while playing, because of this I have decided to play my song on guitar. Although I am more confident playing the guitar I still need practice with singing while playing so I have done some research with tips of how to achieve this. I found a website with 10 helpful tips.

1. Playing and singing are not two separate things, when playing your singing and strumming rhythms need to correlate so that they sound seamless.

2. It is not necessary to overcomplicate a song, only play songs that are at your skill level. Start off by playing an easy song that you know well, songs with only a few chords and a simple strum pattern.

3. Know your basic guitar skills, you must be able to change chords and know your strumming pattern well so that you can play without thinking about them. This will enable you to concentrate on your singing.

4. Memorize the song so you can play it fluently. One way to tell if you’ve mastered a song is if you are able to keep playing it while watching TV or having a conversation.

5. Know how to sing the song, even if you know all the chords perfectly you need to know the tune and the lyrics to the song. This may mean singing the song without the guitar for a while just to make sure you know it perfectly.

6. Hum the song first, you may find it helps to hum the melody over the strumming pattern before singing it. It will help with getting used to any chord changes without having to worry about the lyrics.

7. Slow the piece down, it is much better to sing and play correctly at a slower pace than to speed through the song and get it wrong. Speed will come with practice.

8. If the song you want to play is more complex and involves fingerpicking you may want to start by just strumming the song and when you’ve got that perfectly you can start to move onto the more complex strum.

9. If you find yourself straining to hit the notes in a song try changing the key of the piece. Use a capo or move the chords up a fret or two it will allow you to transpose to piece to either a lower or higher pitch.

10. Keep practicing. As they say, practice makes perfect and even once you’ve acquired a basic skill you will want to push your music to the next level and add to your repertoire. If you get stuck even on more difficult songs, go through these tips step by step and keep practicing (Dickson 2015).

These 10 steps have helped me in creating my piece and being able to play and sing at the same time. This will push my musical performance to the next level.

Gabrielle Aplin

For my individual piece I have taken inspiration from Gabrielle Aplin. She is a singer song writer who started simply by posting her music on YouTube. The reason I am inspired by her is because her music consist of piano and acoustic guitar, both of which are instruments I can play to a moderate standard. She is not alone with her style of music, there are many others who are also old-fashioned singer-songwriters such as Ed Sheeran, Ben Howard and Mumford & Sons. “I think people like it because it feels honest (Aplin, 2013)

Aplins songs are mainly about heartache and desire, in a simple, pop-folk idiom. I have taken inspiration from her song ‘Home’ It is simple and played on an acoustic guitar which I am more confident playing over piano. I also find this song relatable as I live quite far away from home while studying at university so to me this song is comforting.

This is the chorus to the song ‘Home’

"'Cause they say home is where your heart is set in stone
Is where you go when you're alone
Is where you go to rest your bones
It's not just where you lay your head
It's not just where you make your bed
As long as we're together, does it matter where we go?
Home home home home"

Evaluating Our 70s Performance

When performing our song ‘Burn’ we all sang together.  This piece was very successful vocally as we all sang creating a three part harmony which added depth to the song. The backing track had a saxophone, piano and we later added a drum as we felt it was needed to make the piece feel more like soul. ‘The musical composition of soul music was initially comprised of vocals accompanied by the sounds of the guitar, bass, piano, organ, drum, horn, or even a full orchestra. Soul music was characterised by a distinctive bass melody and a strong percussion beat’ (Soul Decision n.d.). I feel the performance would have been better if the instruments were played live, but as we only had a small group we decided that it would sound more like soul if we sang in harmony and were able to just focus on singing.

As we found in our research when creating the song most soul music from the 70s is about love, the heartbreak, the happiness, so the intention for our 70s piece was to find a song that demonstrated this. When we chose the song ‘Burn’ we found it was about love but in a more metaphorical way, the song is equating love to light and the fire that burns inside us all, it is about the passion that keeps us all going. We sang the song in soft tones, for example when I sang the chorus, rather than belting the high note I sang it in my head voice to give the piece a more loving feeling. This helped push our intention as if we’d sang harshly to the words ‘fire fire fire’ the audience may have got the wrong idea of what we were trying to portray.

Our 70s song ‘Burn’ had good timing with both the choreography and vocals. It could have been improved by changing the vocal pattern to the solo parts in the vocals, especially when I sang the final chorus with no backing vocals, this would have giving the piece a more soul feeling to it. I feel we also needed to have rehearsed the piece more in front of a small audience as this would have given the group confidence, this would have added to the piece for it would have meant we all had our heads up smiling, which would have created a nicer sound while singing.

Evaluating Our 60s Performance

For our 60s piece I sang, Ashley played bass and Jess played the keyboard, while the backing track consisted of a guitar and drums. The song was slightly too low for me to really push my vocals and I feel it made the song stay on one level rather than creating a change in dynamics which were only really pushed in the last chorus where I sang up the octave. If I were to sing this again I would consider transposing it into a higher key and play around with different ways of singing each part of the song to make it more interesting to listen to.

The intention of our 60s piece ‘The Rock n Roll Farm’ was to portray the free living life on the farm. As many folk rock songs were connected to the “Hippie” movement at the time and where influenced by the feelings of freedom, love and peace, which I feel was well portrayed in our song. Lyrics like many folk songs were what made this piece a success in meeting its intentions, although during the performance I sang the lyrics slightly wrong which may have jeopardised the success of the songs potential, but it was well recovered and I feel as a group we worked well through the mistake as it did not affect our performance. The upbeat tempo of the song gave the song a happy atmosphere and made it enjoyable for the audience.

To develop our 60s piece further I feel we would need to have the entire song played live. I think that if we had a drummer and guitarist on stage also it would have made the piece sound a lot better. I also think it would add to the staging of the piece and would have meant the members in the group could have had more involvement with each other. For example if we had a drummer and keyboard player they could have interacted with each other while the bass player and guitarist did the same and the singer addressed the audience directly, this would have also made the drum and guitar solo more effective when the dancers came on stage. I feel this would have engaged the audience much more and made the piece more enjoyable to watch. We also could have used the dancers more effectively by adding more colourful lighting effects and possibly using audience participation to really push the piece into having that free spirit feeling that many folk rock songs had.

Creating Our 70s Soul Song

Urbanization and commercialization of rhythm and blue was the reason for soul music. There was a lot of diversity within soul music such as the bouncy catchy acts of motown to the gritty sound of Stax. As time progressed soul became harder and tougher, it relied on raw vocals and syncopated rhythms. Motown, R&B, Gospel and rock&roll all formed soul music. It dominated the black charts and frequently crossed over into the pop charts. Eventually soul began to splinter as artists like James Brown formed other forms of soul like funk. Although soul music has evolved it is still around today, not only did it inspire all R&B music in the 70s 80s and 90s musicians from around the world kept performing traditional soul (All Music, n.d.)

Soul is focused on songs about love, heartbreak and really focuses on the vocals of a song, because of this as a group we decided to use a song we already knew, and re-create the song into the style of soul. We chose the song ‘Burn’ by Ellie Goulding, as we felt the vocal arrangement had a lot to work with and the lyrics are about being strong and independent when it comes to feelings of love.

“We, we don’t have to worry ’bout nothing / ‘Cause we got the fire, and we’re burning one hell of a something / They, they gonna see us from outer space, outer space / Light it up, like we’re the stars of the human race, human race.” This part of the song is saying that she is burning so bright that she can be seen from space. It is quoting the old saying that it is better to burn out than fade away.

 

“Strike the match / Play it loud / Giving love to the world / We’ll be raising our hands / Shining up to the sky / ‘Cause we got the fire, fire, fire.” Life is burning too bright to allow anyone to get any shut eye or sleep. Goulding is equating love to the light and the fire that burns inside us all. She’s speaking of the passion which keeps us going (Sciarretto, 2014).

From what we learnt about soul music we created a backing track which included a saxophone and piano. During rehearsals we realised our backing track needed more of a backing beat to it so we also added and drum. When staging our piece we created a simple dance and mainly focused on our vocals which we used to create 3 part harmonies to add depth to the song.

Creating Our 60's Folk-Rock Song

Folk-Rock is mainly known for its distinctive elements such as chiming, ringing guitar hooks, coupled with clear vocal harmonies. The Byrds were hugely successful and pioneered folk-rock in the 60’s they established the blue print that many bands followed. The Byrds inspired many other folk-rock groups to arise most of whom emphasized the acoustic origins of folk. As folk-rock progressed as its own unique sound both acoustic and electric folk-rock sounds where a commonplace in rock & roll (Complex Music, n.d.).

Doing further research into the Byrds I looked at some of there lyrics to help our group in creating our own folk-rock song, this is the first verse and chorus to ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

The lyrics are simple, happy, catchy and repetitive, so using all the information gathered we began writing our song ‘rock n roll farm’. We came up with the idea as there are many country songs are based around the farm life, so we decided to write about the fun lifestyle of living on a farm.

Piano Styles

When learning to play piano I decided to look at different styles that I may be interested in playing to help me decide what sort of things I need to research to enable me to continue learning. This will also help me when I eventually come to create my own music for I will know how certain styles are played.

Many modern piano styles are based on the blues. The blues involve an emphasis on the major and minor pentatonic scales, with an additional note included. The flatted fifth is added to the minor pentatonic to create the blues scale. Many blues songs are based on a simple chord progression, known as 12-bar blues. This uses the I, IV and V chords of a scale to create a foundation for melodies and solos.

Rhythm and blues piano is based on blues, jazz, and gospel styles. As the name suggests, the emphasis is on the rhythm of the song. Most R&B has a particular swing to it, with a strong feel of syncopation in the rhythm. Syncopation involves placing the stress on a normally unstressed beat. This often results in an almost off-time feel to the untrained ear. This would help me when creating our soul piece for our group work.

New age piano often involves less chord changes than other styles, instead relying on simple two-chord progressions and polychords. A polychord occurs when two different chords are played at once. This technique is taken from earlier classical works by composers such as Stravinsky.

The classical piano style is probably the most varied of all the styles. Classical music is older than other styles, and is considered to the proper grounds for musical instruction. Many elements of other piano styles come from classical music, and nearly all forms of musical theory are used in classical music. Classical music usually requires intense training to master, though there many pieces designed with the novice player in mind.

Though classical is often considered the high point of music, this is not necessarily so. For instance, many players who are “classically trained” have trouble adapting to the feel and sincerity of the blues. For this reason, a well-rounded player should be adaptable and learn as much about each of these piano styles as possible. In this way, a pianist is ready for any musical challenge.