Square Pegs Arts Music Programme - Square Pegs Singers 2020 - adapting to lockdown

Our regular singing workshops would normally see us meeting up in Canterbury to learn a new song, but the current situation and the lockdown rules meant that that wasn’t going to be possible in May. Not wanting to miss out on the session, we decided to change the way we do things and do the session anyway, but this time we’d do it online.

We’d already decided to do Lean on Me for this session and it seemed like an even more appropriate song considering the circumstances and the message behind the song. Instead of getting together, our music leader Paul sent round a tutorial video of him teaching the song in the same way as he would do if we were all there along with a pre-recorded backing track with guide vocals, lyrics and a set of simple, easy-to-follow instructions of what to do.

We all then had to learn the song and film ourselves singing along to the backing track on headphones so only our voices would be recorded. This worked really well as, if there were any bits that we wanted to go over again, we could just go back over the tutorial until we were happy. It was a bit strange singing it by ourselves but Paul’s voice on the backing track was helpful and we all managed it ok.

We then sent the videos back to Paul who then had to edit them all together so we could sing the song as a big group.

He took the audio of our recordings and put them in a Logic project so he could balance them out and mix the track with the backing, before then editing together visuals over the top to make our first ever Square Pegs Singers music video.

Although it was sad that we couldn’t meet up physically, it was really good to see the finished result and watch us all sing the song together from our own homes. It’s also nice to have a product at the end to share with even more people. The other benefit of doing it this way, is it removes some of the accessibility limitations that may have been there for some people and as well as all of the usual cohort of singers, we had several new participants join in too!

The video has gone down really well, and is even going to be featured on the local news in the next couple of weeks!

This process involves a lot more work than our usual workshops, but the results have been excellent and we’re really happy that we can still enjoy our singers sessions even though we can’t all be there in person.

Can’t wait for the next song.