Hey you guys and welcome back to The Singing Studio! This is the second part of my three-part lesson about how we can break down a song. So we’re going to dive right into it today. In our previous video we talked about breaking down the song by rhythm and clapping and counting it out loud. Well now we’re going to focus on breaking down the song by melody, but we are not going to sing the words yet. We are going to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but we’re going to hum it first. So let’s go ahead and let’s hum it together- just the first line.
Great job! So as we’re humming it, be sure that we’re still staying on the rhythm. Because we have clapped and counted out all the beats and the rhythms, it’s important for us to continue to maintain the proper rhythm and beat marks as we are humming it. Just wanted to remind you of that. Well now that you’ve hummed it, now you can start playing around with it and putting it on different vowels. So I’m going to choose the vowel “wee” and I’m going to sing that same thing but on “wee”.
Awesome! You can choose whatever vowel you want. You can do it on an “ooo”, you can do it on an “ah”, you can do it on a “lah”. Whatever you want to do and whatever is most comfortable for you. The reason why we are not singing it on the words yet is because you want to only hear the melody and not have the words accidentally mess you up. For whatever reason sometimes when we are singing a song and we’re singing it with the words, sometimes we’ll get the rhythms mixed up or sometimes we’ll get the melody mixed up. That’s just sometimes what happens. But when we’re breaking it down we’ll be able to isolate and be able to focus on the different elements of the song that make up the whole song. Even though we know Twinkle Twinkle really well and we can probably all hum it by memory, it’s important to practice this so that when you go into your actual songs you can sing through the whole song but on a hum and on a vowel. When you’re breaking down a song by the melody be sure to hum it first. Maintain those rhythms as you’re humming it and then put it on your favorite vowel.
I’m going to leave up the song now and I’m going to go ahead and play the melody so that you can practice singing on your favorite vowel and humming it. Here we go.
And that is all for this video today. Be sure to like it! Be sure to watch our Breaking It Down Part One where we break it down by rhythm, so that you can be ready for our final breaking it down video where we will explore the final element of how we break down a song. I hope you have a wonderful day and I’ll see you in our next video!
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.