term 3- lesson 4

Wednesday 6th of May 2015

Over this week:

This week we had the task of learning our songs and ensuring we were comfortable with them. I personally went home and sung  through them everyday, this helped me learn the lyrics. I really worked on the harmonies in Dear Future Husband because I knew I was struggling slightly. I asked my other group members for help, this was good because it allowed me to constantly practice.

I personally have been working on the pronunciation of certain lyrics in Lady Marmalade. the lyrics are in french, however I sat down everyday and worked on them. I know know how to sing them with confidence :)

In rehearsal:

We were organised once again, we all knew what we wanted to do. As we already broke the sections the previous week, we could now work on the technical aspects. Ensuring the harmonies were correct and the tuning/pitch were up to standard.

As we already broke the sections this week we looked at the performance quality. Ensuring we knew how we wanted to handle the microphones etc. also the positioning of each other was significant, this was because we split off into different harmonies. We agreed quickly and we each got a chance to take centre stage.

When singing with the microphones we would really work on the energy, at times the songs sounded boring, however after a little pep talk we all worked harder and gave a performance, rather than just sing. It was important to sing it like the real thing because it would show us where the mistakes lied. After rehearsing the performance qualities we then noted down what we needed to work on in the other rooms. Which was timing and harmonies.

Once in the smaller room, we just kept running over the songs. We stopped at the parts that didn’t sound as good as others. For example the 2^nd time we sung the chorus in Dear Future Husband it should’ve gone up a key, we weren’t doing that. Therefore we worked on the transition of the part before going into the chorus. One member broke it down on the piano so we could see how much we needed to go up. This was useful because it allowed us to see the difference, it also made the song sound more brighter.

We stuck to our original plan. The week before we decided to clean up both pieces and to look at how were going to perform them. We also decide on the order of the songs. We went with Dear Future Husband first, this would allow us to get comfortable with performing to the audience. We then are going to end with Lady Marmalade. We chose to end with this song because we feel as a group it’s a showstopper, and allow us to show of our individual talents and our ensemble work.

Overall I believe the progress we have made is really positive. We have finished both the pieces, we now just need to keep practicing. We decided as a group to set up another rehearsal date on this upcoming Monday to work on performing the songs full out, one after the other. My goal this week is to keep going over the harmonies and to be confident in what I am doing.