SONGWRITING WORKSHOP

WORKSHOP

We were lucky enough as a class to be able to have Rhonda, from the ashford arts centre, come in and do a workshop with us. Initially we were only going to be in the studio for a few hours but we ended up staying in there the whole day and creating a demo recording of a track.  

When she first came in, she sang two sonnets to us, from the 1800's, this was to show us the range at which her voice can work. She then went on to ask us what we thought the lyrics meant, followed by telling us the real story behind the sonnets, and asking us if we could relate to the feelings or even have an opinion on them. She then asked us about finding metaphors within the room, creating them out of anything and how we can make a metaphor out of anything we see. She asked us to all individually say something we saw, I was thinking about using the window, maybe "I can see as clear as glass" "I see through you like I see through that window" or something like that. There were a lot of light metaphors and keyboard ones too. 

The next part of our session included writing down a feeling that a teacher, past or present had made us feel, it could be good or bad, absolutely anything. I chose the word anxious, as most teachers have made and still make me anxious, there was a long list of different words representing different feelings throughout the class. Next she asked us to put that word into a sentence, my sentence was "you made me feel anxious, again, today". Then she asked us to all, one by one read them out, and get into groups of good and bad words. The next step was to create a song, using all of our sentences. We had already established that there were 3 hip hop style artists, 3 singers and a few pianists/guitarists. So we got into our groups and started to piece together that sentences went better with what, we ended up writing whole new lyrics for a chorus, and keeping the sentences for josh to rap. Then Olly and I wrote a short piano and guitar hook, whilst the others made a drum pattern to fit, piecing these together allowed us to get a feel of the song. 

After a few hours of practising and trying to figure the structure out, we recorded a rough version. To say the least, it needs A LOT of work, the rapping was totally out of time, the singing wasn't great and the music accompanying it could've been a whole lot better, but it allowed us to get a feel of a studio environment and to experiment in different ways with song writing. I don't think I will us these techniques in the future as I usually write about my feelings, but it is good to have another method if I ever get writers block.