Year 11 Music

Composition #2:

25/08/17
Today we had a special visit from Matt Barus a member of the band "The Dukes". He had a composing workshop planned for us for the whole day. It started of with Matt listening to the compositions we created earlier on and he gave us feedback on it as well as the other students who attended the workshop. Matt then gave us chance to come up with our own melodies to tracks that have already been created. This was followed by us also been giving the chance to come up with a lyrics too. Anna and I were working together which was great because I work well with her (well most of the times) but we did come up with a killer verse, pre chorus and chorus that was about a friendship falling apart and the friend not knowing what went wrong or even why. At first when and Anna and I were writing down the lyrics we didn't know what exactly we were writing about but it seemed to flow so we worked with it; until we looked at the lyrics properly and they explained exactly what went down in one of our friendships.

29/08/17

Today Anna and I had come up with another verse and a bridge to go along with it. The verse that we came up with we decided to base on how things are now when running into that person we use to be so dearly close with. In this verse it just explains some of things they tend to do when we bump into each other. The bridge is about how things are now and how better off we are without that person in our lives as we seem to be heading into brighter futures. 

3rd of September on wards

From here on out  Anna and I just finished out composition off and cleaned up a few errors we thought that needed to be fixed. We then had our music teacher, Mrs Beer, work along aside us with a but of harmonies that Anna and I liked to add into our song. After we polished our composition we then recorded it and here is a snippet of our composition

Year 11 Music

Composition:

For the past few weeks in music Anna Pohatu and I have been working on our music composition as apart of our level 1 music curriculum. 

It first started off with Anna and I trying to work on our own compositions by ourselves. But that didn't seem to work out very well; our teacher seen that Anna and I were struggling individually and suggested that Anna and I work together to make things a little bit easier. 

2 weeks in and everyone else was underway with their composition and Anna and I had nothing at all to work with no lyrics, no melody, nothing! We even struggled trying to even come up with a simple title for our composition. During one of our music periods after a couple of minutes of critical thinking we came up with the title 'Summer Breeze'. Later on that week we successfully came up with things that cooperated with the title 'Summer Breeze' but struggled to put it into a song. This left Anna and I back at square one. 

It's fair to say Anna and I mucked around (well I definitely did) during the making of our composition. At times we complained about how hard it was but most times we just couldn't be bothered in all honesty. But during one of our music periods Anna and I thought it was about time we put our heads together and actually tried to come up with something for our composition. We sat around for half the period messing around spitting our lines and trying different melodies. After all that time I finally came up with a simple melody and Anna, being very talented when it comes to music, was able to pick up the melody on guitar just by listening to what I was humming. 

Now that Anna and I had something to work with we were able to get underway with our song. Since the whole 'Summer Breeze' theme didn't work out and Anna and I had already decided that we weren't going to compose a depressing song cause it was just too sad for us; but a depressing song seemed to be the only option as they seemed to be easier to write about. Because we know that when writing a song it just flows free without having to put a lot of thinking into it. We decided that we would write one of my past relationship. At first I wasn't really keen about writing about it because there are just some things I don't like sharing with everyone. But it was pretty much the only hope Anna and I had for something to write about. Anna and I later on decided that it wasn't going to completely be depressing but also a song about a strong and independent woman moving on with her life after a heart breaking relationship. We mucked around for a while like we always did and ended up coming with the chorus. 

Chorus:
 Don't want to wait around for you
 Ain't gonna waste my time on you
 When you realize you're missing me 
 I'll be off doing better things

 Not going to sit around no more
 No gonna cry about you no more
 When you realize you're missing me
 I'll be moving on

We tried to think of things that someone would express when moving on after a relationship. There was also a rap that we added later on; and in one of our music periods our Maori teacher, Matua Corey, heard we were composing our own songs and decided that he wanted to listen to a few and chose to listen to ours. He gave us feedback and feed forward that were really helpful. One of his suggestions were to right what I was feeling and what happened from beginning to end. After I wrote out everything; about how it all started and why we ended things; and Anna then picked bits and pieces of what I wrote and put it together into verses. Anna spent a few days on trying to come up with verses and she was successful with it. We then put it all together and it sounded great but it was just missing was a second verse and a bridge. We then spent some time together coming up with another verse but Anna ended up doing it herself and I came up with the bridge. When we went over the song a couple times we figured that it was too long and so we just stuck with a verse, rap, bridge and the chorus sang 3 times. 

Anna and I felt very proud of ourselves as we didn't think we would complete it seeing as we took longer than we should have. But we did complete it and we're proud of what we came up with. Something we could do better for our next composition is to manage our time better; maybe by setting a due date for each sections to be done for example by the end of a week lyrics would have been written and another week we would have a melody ready to put together with our lyrics and the rest of the time we have is to just tweak some things to make it better. Also update our blogs while we're at it so things aren't rushed and put all onto one bog post. But one thing we did well was when we were really feeling it we just got to work and we actually got a lot of things done. But Anna and I still achieved with coming up with a song because it isn't all that easy. 

Here is a shot clip of our composition before we perfected it...