A day out is organised to visit Create Studios in Swindon. The lads are driven up by Mrs Leach and Bev - the idea is work with Barry Andrews, Music Producer & Musician, the studios are part of the Wyvern Theatre, so the lads hope to get on stage and make a spontaneous short play. Jill had also organised to take some of the Questarians over to do a radio broadcast at Swindon 105.5 fm, all between the hours of 10 - 3.00 pm. It was time for fun and action, a race against the clock! Quest 1 worked brilliantly well as a team, producing edgy rap & a moving rock anthem - exploring the power of lyrics, music and mood, to tell a story, from dark to light. They all bring something to the creative challenge, for instance, Charlie found his voice, drawing from his recent experience of visiting Glastonbury festival, "you've given birth" I cry, as they all slump in the chair at the end of the day, happy but exhausted. Andrew goes home to write a fantastic report of the days events.
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| Did you know Barry has a mention in Wikipedia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Andrews_(musician) |
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| Andrew, Henry, Charlie, George, Harry & Kieran, writers, composers & performers We're on a journey to be somebody! Andy writes: It was incredible being able to use the studio's today in Swindon! Just seeing all of the professional equipment was a great experience for me, especially as I'm doing GCSE music! As soon as we walked in we were greeted by Barry, we sat down and then started to discuss what we wanted to create. After about 5 minutes George, Ali, Kieran, Henry, Jill and Mrs Leech went to Swindon Radio to plan and edit what they were going to say. Me, Charlie, Ali and Bev then got cracking on with some of the Music. Our first idea for some of the music was to go for a sad theme where the Rabbit was being seen as someone different, and he was being shouted out to in the road. Our plan originally was to start sad and then get more jolly towards the end where he finds himself and starts to help people. We continued writing and eventually recorded the song, we spent another half an hour adding more layers on top to give the song more depth. By this time it was about 12:00 and we decided to get something to eat, we were all really pleased with our selves thinking that we had got it finished and that we were going to get home early. But that was not the case! When the other 4, Jill and Mrs Leech had came back from the radio station we all listened to the song together. Even though we had been making the music all morning this was the first time we had heard it in one whole piece. We noticed that the song was too sad and very a bit violent and that it wasn't suitable for our target audience that was primary school children. So back we were again, back to square 1 with no music with no more than maybe 2 hours to make another song. This knocked everyone down a bit and we were out of ideas. Sad songs are easy to make because you can say almost anything. But with happier songs you really need the lines to fit together well. After about 25 minutes me, Charlie, Ali, Kieran and George had came up with a chorus. Also to go on top of this Charlie also managed to fit it to a rhythm. We walked into Barry's studio and literally hummed to him what we wanted the song to sound like. We started off with Ali playing a short drum riff to play the base of the song, then Barry played an amazing electric guitar solo over it. Now it was time for the Lyrics! Charlie walked up to the microphone and started singing the first verse. It was amazing you can tell that he was nervous but then after a couple of goes he was a natural. Barry managed to fit the lyrics to beat and the song really started to sound like it was coming together now. It was now time for the others to go and take pictures of the rabbit and the clown on the Wyvern Theatre stage and explore in the basement, as they left they wished us good luck on our mammoth task of getting this song done in time. We got started on the second verse it just seemed to role of our tongues, it was easy! We had no trouble coming up with the next verse, it only took us a couple of minutes. Next we had to come up with the chorus to really bind the song together, for this we looked back to our rough ideas from when we just started planning the song. We found two simple lines "We're on a journey!" "To be somebody!" These simple but effective lyrics fitted perfectly to the song. The song was almost complete, we went in to talk to Barry how long the music was. Baring in mind that the older piece of music we made was around 2 and a half minutes long we were anxious because that was only just long enough! Barry scrolled to end of the song to see the tiny number 0:44, it was 44 seconds long! This account was so long I couldn't upload it at once! See below for more... |
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| Ali leads on drums... Thanks to Create Studios, Swindon, for supporting our project! http://createstudios.org.uk/ Now this did make me and Charlie anxious because now Ali had to leave to go to Young Musician of the Year at our school- Good luck to Ali! So me and Charlie had to some how find almost 2 minutes of song somewhere in an hour. We thought the best thing we could do was to plod on with the next verse. In this verse we managed to make it double as long as any of the other verses, this would really help make the song go on longer! In between the 3rd verse and the 2nd one we added a long instrumental with a guitar solo. By this time the song was nearly at the 2 minute mark. The group that were downstairs were finished and they were curious on how we had got on. They were amazed at how much we had done, but there was one more thing to be done. The needed to finish the song with an outro, we though that for this we could simply just repeat the chorus whilst the music fades out for about 20 seconds. We recorded this with everyone singing- It had a great effect and it really expressed the energy that we put into that song! It was almost time to go, we all had one more listen all the way through. Before we went we all thanked Barry for really helping get this music together in such a short amount of time. In the car on the way back we had the song ringing in our heads! It was incredible how we had to start the song again at 12:30 and managed to finish it in time, and it was such a catchy song!!! Wow almost a thousand words! Report by Andy |
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