Second Group Rehearsal

We all came into today's rehearsal thinking the same thing, we wanted to do a different song. We spent some time researching songs but we had hit a brick wall. After consulting with Hayley she advised us to watch The Sons of Pitches cover of MMMBop in 10 Genres. 

The Sons of Pitches 'MMMBop in 10 genres' - The Naked Choir: Episode 5 - BBC Two (BBC, 2015) 

Two things became clear to us at this point, this cover worked very well because a) the 10 different genres were clearly communicated and b) the song that they chose is very well known, repetitive and a typical "guilty pleasure" song. Not long after watching the video and discussing it Louise suggested that we could perhaps do a cover of "Doo Wah Diddy" By Manfred Mann. We agreed as a group that this was the exact kind of song we were looking for and began rehearsing. 

The first thing we did was listen to classic ballads and listed what we thought were the main elements, the original list is shown below:

WHAT DEFINES A BALLAD?

-Slow 

-Soft verse, powerful chorus

-Power

-Meaning

-Emotion

-Light

-Sounds pretty

-Starts low (chest voice)

-Delayed drums

-Vibrato

-Memorable riff

-Block chords

-Build ups

-Harmonies

-Ad lib

-Identical chorus until the last two

If we are fully able to understand what makes a ballad we should be able to successfully turn a pop song into one. We began arranging the song. To start with, we selected who would sing which part to make sure that everyone was given an opportunity to showcase their voice. We then figured out where the harmonies would best fit and what these harmonies would be. When a soloist is singing we decided to have the other voices accompanying them with a variety of "oos" and "aahs", this would give the song more texture and depth and help create a richer and stronger sound. At first we were finding it difficult to create harmonies but we found that because there are only two main chords to this song (C and G) that most of the harmonies could be repeated, we would just change the dynamic and/or vowel sound in order to make it sound different. 

Toward the end of the rehearsal we took 5 minutes to begin discussing what we were wanting to do for our second song. We all agreed that we still want to change the genre of the song because we believe that this can be very effective if its done correctly. Eventually we decided to do the opposite of what we had just done, we're going to take a ballad and turn it into a pop song. We believe that this will present us more challenges than the other song but now that we are feeling more confident as a group we should make progress quicker.