Hi you guys, welcome back to The Singing Studio! Today’s video is the first video in a three-part lesson that I will be teaching you. The lesson I’m going to be focused on is breaking down a song. How do we do it? What are the ways we can do it? And why is it important? So let’s dive right into it.
The different ways that I’m going to teach you on how you can break down a song are breaking down the song by rhythm, breaking down the song by melody, and breaking down the song by text. So in each video I will be focused on one of those elements and today we are going to focus on how to break down a song by rhythm. Why is it so important to break down the song? Why would we do that in the first place? Well let me explain! When we’re learning a song, sometimes when we look at our music it can become very overwhelming and we don’t know what to do and we don’t know where to start. Breaking down the song can help us prioritize how to learn this song. It can help us with memorization actually and it can help us understand the song and retain it more in our heads. Sometimes it may seem like we’re taking baby steps but those baby steps will actually help us create the bigger picture and help us know the song so much better.
The song that we are going to be using is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It’s a song that I use quite often in our videos and the reason I choose it is because it’s a simple song. It’s one that a lot of us recognize and it’s just really good to practice. Whatever you learn in these videos you can apply to your repertoire that you’re currently learning
As you can see we have Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. We’ve got the notes, we’ve got the rhythms which have the melody and we’ve also got our text. But right now we’re focused on rhythm. This has a time signature and if you look at it it says four so we know that there’s going to be four beats in each measure. We’re going to go ahead and we are going to clap and count this song. Let’s just do the first line. Here we go. One and two and three and four and, One and two and three and four and. One and two and three and four and. One and two and three and four and.
Great job! So that’s pretty much it. That’s what we do! That’s how we break it down as we literally go through the entire song and just clap it out loud. That is the key here. We do not want to do it in our head. When we actually clap and count it out loud, saying it out loud for whatever reason just really helps our brain understand and retain what we are working on. I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to put this music up. Go ahead and pause your video and why don’t you try clapping and counting the whole song? Here you go.
And that is all for our video today. Be sure to like this video and stay tuned for our next breaking it down video where we will focus on the other elements of breaking down a song. Thanks! Have a great day.
I do these videos every other week, but if you still want more musical theatre, check out my newsletter! It’s called “Beyond The Score”, and it just takes a closer look at musical theatre history. You can find that at jskstories.com.