Unit 7 - Theatre in education

Thursday 1^st February

Today we were going into the recording studio to record the songs from the performance so that we can put them on a CD and send them to the children at Lord Scudamore Academy.

Before we did any recording, we carried out a full singing warmup as a group. This included the intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise, scales, arpeggios and the technical exercise. Our voices were now warm and we were ready to sing.

We recorded the songs one by one. The setup was that Cara played the melody on the piano and then we were singing with her. There was a microphone to pick up the sound from the piano and then we were asked to stand in front of another microphone when it was our time to sing.

We started by recording the ‘Sweetie Monster song’. For each song that we recorded, we would have a practice run through so that Mark, a student at college who was recording the songs for us, could make sure that the levels of the microphones were balanced. After the ‘Sweetie Monster song’ we moved onto the ‘Healthy eating song’. Once Kellyann had recorded her solo part for this song, the rest of us were called into the studio to sing the final verse of this song. It took a few attempts to position us in the right places in front of the microphone because some of us naturally sing louder than others so this took a small amount of time to make sure that everyone was at the same sound level. We then stayed exactly where we were because we then recorded the finale. After the finale was ‘Nancy Narrator’s song’. After this, Cara asked me if I would be up for recording the rhythms which I got the children to do with me in the show. We hadn’t planned this but I thought that I would give it a go. I used a shaker when going through the rhythms and this will give the children something to clap along to when they listen to the CD. After the rhythms, we moved onto ‘Fiona’s Fruity Kingdom song’. Next was ‘Sweetie Day’. We then realised that we hadn’t recorded ‘Fiona’s Fruity Kingdom song’ with the interjections from the Sweetie Monster. We figured that it would be easier for me to sing the song again rather than just getting Rob to do the interjections over the top of the track that we had already recorded. Also, doing it this way means that we can have one track with the Sweetie Monster and one track without. The last song that we recorded was ‘Tanzie’s Tropical Fruit song’. We asked Danielle to sing this song for the recording because we thought that this was fair because she did help to write the song and even though she wasn’t able to perform in the show, she was at least able to be on the recording.

Here are a few photos from todays session: