Music (continued)
WILTSHIRE MUSIC CONNECT SONG COMPETITION
When we heard that there was a Wiltshire-wide competition to write a school song, we got very excited. A song writing club started up in January and we had a lovely group of Year 7s attending every week to work on the songs. We ended up writing, improving and recording 2 songs. And guess what? One of our songs (“Together”) won, winning £1000 for the music department! All in all, a fabulous experience for all of us who were involved. Here’s our story.
“Together” written and performed by Tillie Chalke, Harmony Curtis, Amy Wheeler
The first thing we did was make a list of words all spread out on a page which described school and what stands out about it. We chose the most general and important ones and put them together to create the chorus. We chose “We feel like we belong, we know that we are strong when we’re together” because for us being with our friends and learning together is fun and the best thing about being at school.
When we had the chorus ready we were at a good point to start the verses. We didn’t want it to be like a normal song because we wanted it to be unique and different so we used an acrostic poem to create a rap, with the lines all spelling out MATRAVERS SCHOOL. We thought of the 6 core values that Matravers has and focussed our ‘raps’ around these core values, also using the remaining words from the sheet to fill out each of the lines.
When I brought the song into school my teacher helped me to rework the chords and melody so that the melody was more catchy and had more repetition in it. We recorded the song over a few weeks, fine tuning the performance each time.
VISIT TO BBC RADIO WILTSHIRE
When we won the competition, we were invited to BBC Radio Wiltshire as guests on the James Thomas show. We left school at lunch time and drove for an hour to Swindon, where the studio is. Then we went into the BBC building and met the producer and the presenter. He made us feel very comfortable and he was friendly and very positive about our song. We talked to him about the process of writing the song and what we might spend the prize money on. It was really interesting to see how a radio studio works and it was fun to talk into the big fluffy colourful microphones!
Over the following weeks we revised and improved the lyrics, created the melody and the chords to the music. When we were ready to go into the studio we used some drums from the computer to complete our backing music. It took 3 recording sessions to finish the song’s recording but we are really happy with it.
“A Day at Matravers” written and performed by Amy Wheeler (Y7)
I write a lot of songs so I sat down and started writing lyrics about “A Day at Matravers”. I wanted to go
www.matravers.wilts.sch.uk
through the school day so I wrote 2 verses which go through from the morning to the end of the day, with a chorus after each verse. I made my choruses as catchy as I could, so that people can join in with it. I also ended up writing a rap to perform as the intro.
In order to write my song I had to go through a lot of different stages and the first was writing the chorus that everyone would be able to join in with. The next stage was writing verses that explained things about the Matravers school day. I created my lyrics, melody and chords all at the same time.
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