Our recording process continues at Raskob. As before, these songs were written and performed by the kids with only a very little direction from me. It is tremendously satisfying to sit back and watch them direct themselves: “No no no, I think the shakers should come in first!” “Are you crazy? Let’s start off with the congas and then the shakers and everything else come in.” It’s lovely.
I guess today’s songs require a bit of explanation. The first track here is by Platypus Squad (remember all the names are self-chosen as well), and is remarkable because they wrote it outside, on the basketball court, with the help of a giant metal oil-drum trashcan. We can’t record outside because of poor acoustics, so when it came time to lay down this track, we did the only thing possible - brought the oil drum inside. We all loved it! Incidentally, Platypus Squad is a power trio comprised of Nick, Ducson, and Greg. Download Free
And this one, by Shrug, is my first chance in four years of teaching music with these kids to play around with an honest-to-goodness group. On top of our regular percussion Shrug has a guitar and bass, which makes things much more challenging. It’s also, of course, more fun. Next step with these kids is to create a song with distinct verse and chorus. Shrug is Cinque, Carlo, Val, Simon, Aaron, and Kimberly. Download Free
Click on the thumbs to see a bigger pic, and check back soon - more kids exploring new frontiers of music soon…
Now that they’re getting used to leading their own groups, the kids are starting to thrive in this end-of-year recording frenzy. The recordings below were composed and completed by the kids themselves with minimal direction from me. My assignment: “create a song with two or more distinct parts, lead it yourselves, and be prepared to record. You’ve got twenty minutes.” Later, I asked them all to come up with names for their ensembles.
So, this is the Thunderbolts, aka Noah, Sean, Jordan, Steve, and Philip. Download Free
And this is Agree With Ellie, aka Kevin, Henrik, Octavia, Sarah, and of course Ellie. Download Free
More of the kids’ great music as the week progresses. Meanwhile, click the thumbs below to see a bigger pic.
Finally, after many weeks of preparation with kids from grade 3 to grade 8, we’ve got several songs to share. This is the first post of many that I hope to finish before the semester is out, but I’m learning that there are an awful lot of variables to keep track of in doing these projects, and it’s often quite challenging to get set up, get warmed up, practice, then pull off a good recording - all in a mere forty five minutes once or twice a week.
That said, however, these kids are amazing.
The songs we’re recording now actually have very little to do with me, which is wonderful because I can see the kids standing on their own and organizing themselves. I typically split a class into two or three subgroups, appoint a “director” to each group, and give them a basic structure to fulfill in their composition. Then they haul their drums to wherever I’ve assigned them and get started (the weather’s been nice so we’ve gotten a lot of nice playing outside in a eucalyptus grove - the school is in a very pretty location). Soon I check in with them, give a little direction, and give them the five minute warning. After that they try to nail a recording.
This is a recording from last Monday by the 8th graders:
And finally, this is the 5th grade, which I seem to have organized into a choir. This song is partially scripted and partially improvised, involves a lot of call-and-response singing, and requires a serious amount of concentration and coordination for 17 kids to perform all at once:
Click on a thumbnail below to see a bigger picture, and stay tuned: there are more Raskob tunes coming very soon! We’ve got some great stuff in the pipeline…
This is a song I put together with the kids from Natasha Osvald and Stefani Wulkan’s 5th grade classes at Raskob Day School in Oakland. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr., these two excellent teachers had the kids write a sentence or two on the theme “I have a dream…”. Then I started working with them to develop a song which could fit under their ‘dreams’. This is the result, featuring a grand total of 17 kids on instruments as varied as djembes, bodhrans, doumbeks, shekeres, one-shot shakers, seedpods, and xylophone. When I mixed the song I added some beach sounds to cover the hiss from recording in the classroom, and a low synthesizer for some bottom end.Most exciting of all, the kids are downloading this song onto their own mp3 players, so they can get nearly instant feedback on their own music. I’m expecting rapid improvements from this experiment, and later on I’ll have plenty more songs with kids from grades 3 to 8. Download Free
A break in the rain let us have our first class outside this year. There were 16 kids in class, most sitting in a half-moon around the congas. To their dismay, I didn’t record our excellent performances that day, because I still need to get permission slips from parents to distribute our collaborative compositions for free on this site. But stay tuned - soon we’ll get things up and running.
