Community Project - Session Planner

Project Name: Digital Orchestra

Facilitator (your name): Stewart McLean
Date: 7/03/16
Times of Session: 16:00-17:00
Session no: 4
Project Supervisor/Gatekeeper: Lesley Crawford
Your main objective for this session:
Investigate techniques of creating a song with synthesisers.
All participants will get a chance to be involved in the musical
creation process.
Planned Activities for this session:

Each participant must create a bass line on their synthesiser.

How did it go reflecting on this?

Today was fairly effective. Due to one of the participants being off
we decided to look at the techniques and strategies used to
compose digital music with the synthesisers. For a great deal of the
lesson, we looked at how to layer various sounds with Logic, and
discussed the process of doing this with participants. We started off
with a simple bass line, after this we looped this and participants
were asked to improvise over this bass line using various sounds
while we recorded. After listening to this we discussed what sounds
we liked and why we liked them. We continued this process another
two times, which produced a complete sound.

The level of engagement and/or achievement by participants:

There was a good level of engagement among the participants.
There was a lot of free time available for each participant to
musically express themselves. We also left a lot of time for
discussion and participants were able to explain to the group why
they chose certain sounds, or certain melodic phrases. We also
openly discussed as a class, which parts we liked and which parts
that maybe didn't work as well. The end composition that was
created was of a good standard, so I feel our goal was met at the
end.

Feedback/observations and any pointers to enhance or improve the

next session:
It did put us off schedule a bit having an absent pupil. We felt it was
in the groups best interest to continue the main project without his
presence. However I do feel that going over these techniques and
strategies of composition is still beneficial to them, without
jeopardising the overall progress of the group. What was difficult
was to cater to the various musical levels within the group, which
really showed during this session. One of the participants is very
familiar with how synthesisers work, while the other participant
isnt. However we made a conscious effort, to include both their
inputs and creative ideas.