A new week and everyone was excited to be back at the Youth Music Class but oh no, Kate had misplaced her glasses! Thankfully she knew the songs well enough to still teach us. We started with a good stretch to warm up our bodies followed by some swoopy hums to activate our voices. Kate, determined as ever to prove that singing in harmony isn’t scary, split the class into 2 groups. She reminded us of the words and tune to Popocatepétl as a full group then set off group 1 singing it on a loop. After they sang it through once fully she started group 2 singing it as soon as group 1 had sung the first line. We repeated the song several times singing it as a canon and we nailed it! It’s the first time we had felt confident enough to stick to our bit and not get pulled into the other groups line. Yay!
After this achievement we looked back over the first 2 verses of ‘Any Dream Will Do’. Focus was given to rhythm, picking out the crotchet beats and then focusing on the notes for both group 1 and 2. We sang it together a few times and we did it! We sang in harmony. Kate and Tom were really proud of us and we were proud of ourselves.
Tom then continued our Ukulele journey. We refreshed the chords we learnt last week and built in a strum pattern. We then realised that we were actually learning the chords for ‘Riptide’. We circled the chords a good 10 times and we were all starting to get the hang of changing chords. Kate said next week she would sing along a little bit whilst we played so we can get a feel for how that sounds. We can’t wait to continue this next week.
To finish our session this week Kate helped us work through the words of the verses of ‘The Bare Necessities’. The hardest section was verse 2, it is very much like a tongue twister with a lot of prickly pears and paws! Kate broke the verses down into little sections and we repeated each section after she spoke it through at speed to the rhythm needed. She then extended each section little by little until we could speak through the whole verse. We sang the entire song all the way through and although our prickly pears and paws were still a little unsure, it felt a lot easier.
Looking forward to more musical madness next week and hopefully Kate will have her glasses with her!