Presented by Brad Fuller, the past 4 weeks have been a mix of working on our assessment and learning more about Lucy Green Informal Learning pedagogy. More of a lecture style Brad spoke about the positives and negatives of taking an informal learning approach and how he uses a more hands-on approach when in the classroom.
A lot of the literature that I have encountered tends to critique the practice more than it points out the positives. From my time reading about it, learning about it last semester and seeing it used in person it is an inclusive approach that caters to what most musicians do for a living and allows students to develop transferable skills in teamwork etc that will be used in nearly any job they go into. Informal learning also allows the students to choose music that interests them and take control of their learning. An example of informal learning can be seen in our next assignment that I am going to into more detail below...
website link - https://breannegreer08.wixsite.com/website-1
Song Choice
I chose Olivia Rodrigo's song 'One Steps Forwards and Three Steps Back' for a few reasons. The first is that she is currently trending on Tik Tok with this song but mainly due to her sold-out tours everywhere and growing fame from her song driver's license. When transposed down it is all based around the C Major chord which makes it easy for all instruments. This song was originally just vocals and guitar which also allowed for the flexibility that came with writing all the other parts of the song. As described on the website, due to this students can be encouraged to make the song their own without a massive influence and change things up to suit ability level, genre and more!
Recording
For this project, as I didn't know how I wanted to arrange it I recorded everything through Logic and a MIDI keyboard. This allowed the freedom to change things and hear what it sounded like before adding another instrument. Due to the time signature changes between 4/4 and 6/8 I had to program that into the project (as seen at the top). This took a few tries as I kept mucking up the number of bars in each section. I did not record the vocals until recording the videos. After recording the vocals I made sure all the tracks were on Polyphonic Flex mode and transposed them to the keys that are offered on the webstie.
Filming
For this, I had a piano, guitar and microphone at home as was blessed with a beautiful sunny day and natural lighting!! For my instructional videos, I used both my iPad and iPhone to get both angles for the following;
Guitar/Bass - Full Video and Close up of fretboard,
Piano - Close-up of the Pedal and Overhead of the piano.
This all went really well and didn't find any issues.
Editing
For this I used Final Cut Pro and when I say it took forever this is the product of three nights of work! But it was worth it because I am really happy with the final tutorials and play-through. Here is a little blurb about each video;
Guitar/Bass - Using ChordPic https://chordpic.com/ (which I highly recommend) I created specific chord charts and fingering for the song, downloaded the PNGs and inserted them into the project. I resized all videos and added a plain white background for aesthetic purposes and went from there. In order to line up all of the chords so the fretboard didn't look like it was moving, I put them all in the one frame put the same size, X and Y axis and then just put them in for when I played them on the guitar.
Piano - Similar to the guitar except it was a red dot PNG on top of a blank two-octave keyboard that moved around the X-axis.
Drums - used excel to create the drum maps and a white square for the background. To fit it all on the screen I had to resize the main video and use the X and Y axis tools to move it around the screen.
Vocals - for this I just added the lyrics and sections with simple text.
Charts
Simply designed in MuseScore3, I just made a simple band chart that I would use if I was playing a gig. These charts are quite simple and easy to follow and at the click of a button, I transposed them into the same keys the logic songs were for the website.
Website
For this website, I used the same template that I hand-created for my other projects and just added the correct information for this song. This is the reason that I created this template in the first place so that I could easily add and create resources for students at the click of a button.
