Figurenotes and song writing

The Carousel Singers choir and band has created a new song! The creative process involved the band and choir working together to write a song. Using figure notes as a creative tool they have created a unique song which all our members can feel ownership of.

'CREEPY SNEAKY' (a team work song writing process)

Louis our keyboard player composed a spooky verse riff and the choir discussed ideas of how the music made them feel, from this point we arrived at the title ‘creepy sneaky’!

As part of the song writing process we used figurenotes, the fantastic music notation system that utilises colours and easily recognisable shapes. We chose notes from the musical key of the initial riff and made accompanying handheld flash cards. 

see here for more on figurenotes: http://www.drakemusicscotland.org/figurenotes/

The choir worked in smaller breakout groups and used the flashcard colours as inspiration to find original words for a chorus. The corresponding notes on the flashcards were translated into chords played by the band, the chorus words were sang by the choir. Finally a pre-chorus was developed by the band and the whole song was complete. The choir have performed it publicly several times now. We plan to make some recordings very soon, I can't wait to post them here!