Term 3- Lesson 3

Wednesday 29th of April 2015

Over this week:

Last week, it was our groups individual task to go home and familiarise ourselves with the two chosen songs. We had to learn our harmonies and solo sections in Moulin rouge  ‘Lady Marmalade’. The reason for doing this is because when we do get the rehearsal space we could focus more on the performance quality and making sure we are all together. I personally found this difficult at times because finding the space or time to practice. My peers in my other classes don’t steer nicely to hearing the same songs repeated, which leaves time at home. Although this hard, on the weekend and mornings I do try and practice. I feel like I have progressed from last week, I believe the structure and confidence has improved in the song. 

In rehearsal:

In todays rehearsal we were organised. Once again I came prepared with lyrics and highlighters so we could break the song into sections and individual/ensemble parts. This seems to work well with our group because we can visually see what we are doing.

We listened to our second song, which is ‘Dear future husband’ by Meghan Trainor. As the song went along we attempted certain parts to see if our voices were comfortable with it. Then we broke up the lyrics into 3 sections and split the parts. This allowed the progress to go much faster and we got a lot done in the time limit. I feel like we managed our time better this week, we knew what we were going to do in each room.

Once we got into the room with the microphones, we knew straight away we wanted to work on ‘Lady Marmalade’. We wanted to look at the performance side and ensuring we knew how we wanted to hold the microphones etc. We decided for this song we were going to hold the microphones, this allows our body to move more and express what we are singing.

We then got moved into a smaller room, this is where we started to look at the technical aspects of the songs. We looked at the harmonies, ad-libs and the tuning of the song. This was useful because we could dissect the piece and work on the parts we needed to.

I personally need to go home and work on the harmonies in ‘Dear future husband’, I got another remember of my group to record it for me, therefore I just need to practice. Another goal is to learn the lyrics by next rehearsal. This gives the opportunity to sing full out and not be held back.


This is the break down of our lyrics:

(An example)

We stuck with our original plan to work and break down the songs, by doing this it saved time. We are comfortable with our choices. However we could have sung through the songs more to get comfortable without stopping and starting etc.

Overall I believe we got a lot of work done today. We now have two songs for our performance. We have refined and cleaned up Moulin Rouge and now just need to learn the lyrics and perform with intention, similarly with Dear future husband, however need to spend more time working how we are going to perform it, standing/sitting etc.