Lesson video

Hello, my name is Miss Charatan.

Good to see you, in this lesson about how we can play in a virtual band.

We're going to begin with a warmup.

This is about following my instructions and doing the correct rhythm at the correct time, so there are three rhythms I'm going to teach you.

When I say, "Give me one," you go like this: One, so you just do one on your chest, so try that now.

Give me one.

When I say, "Give me two," you double it like this.

Try again.

Give me two.

You should understand? How about give me three, can you guess what that would be? If you said, But with give me three, we are going to carry on for a long time.

Okay, so give me one is like this.

Give me two is like this.

Give me three is like this.

Okay, so let's have a go at putting together.

I'm going to say something and you're going to give me the rhythm without me this time.

Give me one, give me two, give me one, give me two, give me three, give me one, give me three, give me one, give me three.

Excellent.

Do you try this out on some of the people at home, I'm sure they will enjoy it.

Let's get on with our lesson.

In this lesson, you will need the following items of equipment, a piece of paper, something to write on, pencil pen, something to write with, an instrument, or an app, such as virtual piano, lastly, I digital audio workstation.

If you're not quite sure what that is, don't worry.

It is something like Garage Band that you can find for free on iPads and also Band Lab for education, which you can find free online.

If you're not quite sure how to get into the store audio workstation yet, do not worry, we will find that out later in the lesson, pause the video, get the first three things that you need, and return when you're ready.

Lovely, let's move on, so we've got a busy lesson today.

We're going to recap our knowledge of chords so far, you have learnt loads.

We will then create two contrasting chord progressions, and find out what makes them contrasting, we will then understand how to input these into a digital audio workstation.

We will add some other parts to create a complete band, and then we'll explore a bit how to make some chord progressions a bit more interesting.

Let's begin by recapping our knowledge of chords so far.

So, chords basically come into our band musicianship unit, they're a really important part of it.

You are not going to pause the video and write down everything you remember about what we've learned about roles in the band, chords, and rhythm.

If you're a bit stuck, stay with me and I'm going to show you some pictures to help you.

If you can do it without pictures, pause the video now.

Okay.

Here are some pictures to help you, so pause the video, write down everything you know that we've learnt so far, and then resume when you're ready.

Great, well done.

so let's now check our work, so take a different colour pen, and to make sure you're getting ready to note down everything that you have missed, and give yourself a big tick for things that you've got correct, so in the band, we have kind of roughly four main roles.

We have melody, and that's often done by a singer, chords, by the guitar, bassline, by the bass guitar, and rhythm by the drum kit, and the chords, bassline and rhythm together, make the accompaniment.

pause the video and write down anything you missed in this box.

Let's now look at chords, so I've got the colours in the right hand side, and that reminds us of primary and secondary, so a chord is two or more notes or pitches played at the same time.

Primary chords are one, four and five, secondary chords are two, three and six, and they are minor chords in the major key, let's remember about minor and major, so major's sounding really bright and happy, minor's sounding dark and mysterious.

Remember our triads, they have three notes to them, and we work them out by doing play one, miss one, press one on the keyboard, and we've also learned about chord progressions or chord sequences, and these are sets of chords.

Let's now have a-- there's a lot of information there so you probably need to pause it and note anything down that you missed, and then resume when you're ready to go into rhythm.

Let's now have a look at rhythm then, so we had this kind of on, off beat rhythm so we had one and two and three and four and, that was very typical of reggae, and we'd also call that off beat.

We had syncopated rhythms, which emphasise weak beats, so for example, one and two and three and four and, and we also had dotted rhythms, one and two and three and four and, and that's comprised of a longer generally dotted note, and a shorter note.

Have a go at clapping these three rhythms, written down in the box, and pause the video and write down anything that you missed on rhythm.

Excellent.

I'm super impressed of how much you have hopefully remembered.

Let's now do a quick quiz, so what are the three primary chords in C major? Choose the correct answer now.

If you said C F and G you were correct.

So remember C E and G is the triad, the C major triad, it is not the three primary chords.

The three secondary chords, what are they? The correct answer is D minor, E minor and A minor, and that's M, little M, remember that means minor.

What is a chord progression or a chord sequence? A set of notes, repeated chords, or a set of chords? The correct answer is, a set of chords.

So this set of chords might be repeated, but the correct definition is they are a set of chords, we're going to be looking at this in more detail later.

So in front of you, you have got some chord progressions, so on the worksheet, you have got all the different chords on different instruments, so you've got guitar, ukulele and keyboard.

You are going to practise playing these chord progressions, with four beats per chord, So I'm going to play the first one for you.

One, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, G, two, three four, A minor, two, three, four, F, two, three, four.

So you need to make sure you can play each one fluently.

You can experiment with different rhythms of playing them, so for example, For example, or different strumming patterns using different up and down motions, for example, if you're finding this one too easy, could you experiment by pressing these chords in a different key? So for example, doing chord one in G major, rather than C major, you can even create your own chord progression, pause the video to complete this task.

If you have been with me for these five lessons, this should take you maybe five minutes.

If you haven't been with me before, and need a bit more time to work it out, take 10 minutes.

Pause the video and resume when you're finished.

Excellent.

We have done some great recapping of chords so far.

We're now going to move on to creating two contrasting chord progressions.

Okay, so I'm going to play you two core progressions.

They're very slightly different, they're both in C major, and you're going to write down two similarities and two differences about them, so here's the first one, one, two, three, and here is the second one.

You could even have a go at playing these yourself.

If you want to have a go and you can rewind the video and hear them again from me, pause the video, if you need any more time, write down two similarities and two differences.

Okay, so let's share, so the similarities I found were in each of them, the chords all lasted for four beats, both the chord sequences start in C, and they're both four bars long, so lots of similarities there.

I also say they're both in C major, so that's another similarity you could have.

Differences, so chord sequence two uses more secondary chords, so we had three secondary chords in chord sequence two, and only one in chord sequence one.

Chord sequence two has a repeated chord.

Which one was it, can you find it now? Was that A minor chord, so that was repeated, and chord sequence number one is a bit more step wise, 'cause we have this F, G, A, kind of bit, whereas chord sequence number two, has a slightly different shape.

so even though we've got two chord sequences in C major, they are contrasting.

Let's now try and make our own.

So below me, I have got two ingredients-- four ingredients lists for you, so if you choose one ingredients list, that's going to create a contrasting sequence, but if you choose a different ingredients list, so for example, list one, you need to have four different chords, and only use primary chords.

Remind me, what are the primary chords in C major? Yes, so that's C F and G, so for example, this could be your chord sequence for list one.

C, F, G, F, and then you've completed list one.

so you're going to chose two lists, and create a chord progression from that list.

On the worksheet, you're going to have a sheet that looks a bit like this, so you can use this to write in your chord sequence.

If you don't have a worksheet, that's fine.

You can just copy out to grids to help you.

You can also see here.

There is a grid at the bottom of the page, with all the cords in C major.

For now we're going to pause the video to complete this task.

Choosing two separate ingredients lists, writing down your chords and Roman numerals, and if you find this too easy.

Create your own ingredients list and create a new contrasting chord sequence.

This should take you 10 minutes, resume the video when you're finished.

Fantastic, so I'm really excited to hear your chord sequences later hopefully, which chords did you choose and why for your chord sequences, how do you know you can play your chord progression really fluently, and how are your chord progressions contrasting? So we've now created two contrasting chord progressions, well done.

We're now going to learn how to input these chord progressions into a digital audio workstation.

We're going to create a virtual band using audio mixing software, so you're going to record in your chord sequences, but we're also going to add some other things to make it into a band.

The demonstration you're about to see uses a free music software programme called BandLab for Education.

You can use it if you're under 13, but you must get permission from a parent or carer first.

Please speak to your parent, carer or school about setting up the programme.

You should now, if you don't have another digital audio workstation, all ready to go, come to BandLab for Education with me, you can find that by typing it in.

Let's go over to BandLab for Education for the demonstration.

so you should now be on BandLab for Education, and you will have a page that looks a bit like this, perhaps with your school.

You're then going to click on My Library, which is the top here, and then you're going to click on start personal project, so I'm going to go to mixed editor, So, something will come up that it will look like this, and you need to make sure you click on instruments, so click on that now, and then you have something which looks like this.

Don't worry, if it looks a bit scary at first, I'm going to show you how to do it.

The first thing we're actually going to do is name our project, so you can put your name here.

Ms Charatan virtual band.

You can do something similar.

The next thing you would need to do is practise your chords, so you can see at the bottom here, we've got an instrument, so I've got the keyboard, and this corresponds to my computer keyboard.

Take a moment to experiment with the way the chords are laid out on your computer keyboard, so you might take a few little goes to get going.

Here we go.

I'm going to turn it up a little bit, have a play on your computer keyboard and try and find your four chords, that you did for one of your chord sequences, so for example, let's take my chord sequence, which is C major.

I'm going to find a C, which is the comma, Q, an E, and then my next one was D major, so I basically move all my fingers up to the right, and I need to jump down to my minor chord, which is on N.

Pause the video now and experiment around with your computer keyboard and how you can pay your chord sequence on it.

The next thing you need to do is record in your chord sequence.

If we look up here, we can see that this gives us our beat per minute, which means our speed.

At the moment, it will sound, it was roughly this fast.

So that's probably a little bit faster, record it in, so we can always do that later, so you can click on it and then you just drag it down, and this makes it much, much slower, three four.

So the highest sound is beat number one, so that's going to be really useful for you, so we're going to make it slower so we can record it in really accurately.

You need to make sure this metronome button, which is the clicker is on, so it will turn blue, to turn the metronome on.

Hopefully you've had a bit of a practise of your chord sequence.

Sometimes you need to click on the keyboard to make it work again, 'cause it goes to sleep.

So, I'm ready to record in.

I'm going to press record, it will give me a count in and I'm going to record in my chord sequence with four beats per chord, I'm going to press the space bar to stop it as well, so I made a couple of small mistakes there, that doesn't matter, I don't have to delete them.

Delete and try again, I can actually change my mistakes, so the first thing I'm going to do is going to click in, on this, and here is my editor.

The first thing you might've noticed is that there was a bit of a lag with my keyboard, so I'm going to make it in time.

I do that by selecting all of the notes like this, and then I click on quantize, so I change this to one over two, and then I press quantize and they will all move, so they're perfectly in time, even though I didn't pay them that way.

You might have spotted that I don't have one of my notes on here because I forgot to play it on my computer keyboard.

I should have practised more, definitely.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new note, I do this by pressing the pencil button, and the note that's missing is my G, so I'm going to click in my G, which is here, and I'm missing a note here, which is an A, so that's two above D1, two, and then you can see it's very short, so I'm going to make it longer like this, and if I play it, it's perfectly in time.

The last thing I need to do is I've got a lot of empty space at the end here, so I'm going to cut it so you can see at the bottom here, there's a kind of cut tool, so I'm going to cut it, so it ends up five.

Is that a five, yes it is, and then that means I can loop it if I want, for it to carry on for a very long time.

The very last thing you might want to do is change the instrument you've got laid.

You don't have to choose the piano, so for example, I might choose another thing, that's might be in a rock band, in a pop band, so I might use a guitar.

So it's now on a guitar sound.

We're now going to read through the instructions one more time, so you know exactly what to do.

You are now going to pause the video for 10 minutes to input your chord progression into a digital audio workstation, reading the instructions really carefully to make sure you've remembered all the steps such as metronome and making sure it's in time.

If you finish this really quickly, why not record in your contrasting chord progression as well.

Pause the video, take 10 minutes and resume when you're finished.

Well done, really good job at using that software for probably the first time.

So which chord progression did you choose and why? If you did two of them, why did you choose one of them? Which instrument did you end up choosing and why? so I chose a guitar because it sounded a bit more poppy for me, and then what did you do to ensure your chords are in time? Pause the video, reflect on these questions, and resume when you're ready to move on.

Great, so we've inputted our chords into a digital audio workstation, and we're now going to learn how to add other parts to create our complete virtual band.

So let's look back at our band here, so what layer have we got so far, and what other layers do we need? So, so far we have got the chords and we need some rhythm, and we need a bassline.

However, we also do need a melody, but we're not going to do that one today 'cause that's a bit more complicated.

I'm now going to demonstrate on BandLab for Education, how you can add other layers.

so we're now going to add two more layers to our virtual band.

We're going to add a bassline.

First thing that we need to do is duplicate a track because we find our bassline from our chords.

I'm going to click on this track and right click on it and duplicate track.

I'm now going to label both of my tracks.

I'm going to label this, and call it chords, I'm going to label this one, bassline.

Pause the video and do that with me now, and resume when you're ready.

Great, so we've got our bassline now, but there's a few things I need to change, so I'm going to click on it.

Double click, sorry, and first thing I do is change the instrument.

What kind of instrument will play a bassline? If you're thinking bass guitar, you're completely correct, so I need to go on instruments, change it to bass, and I can choose, it's a whole variety of here.

I'm just going to do the normal one.

I'm going to turn that, make it sustain-- there, I'm going to do something else actually.

Let's do funky slap.

This sounds quite fun, so I'm going to change it, so I need to now go back onto my media editor, and you can see I've got my four chords here, but it's a bit high for a bassline, so I'm going to select all of my chords, going to do minus 12 here, which takes it down.

Let's hear, so that's a bit lower, and I've accidentally deleted something, oopsie, I also forgot to put this one down.

So I'm going to do that one too.

I actually disagree with this slap-based sound, I'm actually going to change it 'cause it didn't sound quite as good as I thought, so let's have this one, going to have this one back again, So if I listen now to my midi, it sounds good actually.

A baseline will not have more than one layer, so basses can't really play chords, so we need to delete the top two notes of our chords.

This is because the bassline is the root, the bottom note of our chords, so let's take out, you just click on it, you press delete, now, we hear this with our chord-- oh, I see, I think I've accidentally left one up there.

No I haven't, alright, let's hear.

So we can hear that one, now you might want to turn it off a little bit as well, because it's a bit quieter in the chords, so that's your bassline sorted.

The next thing you need is some drums, so what we're going to do now is we're going to create a new track, so add to track, this time I'm going to put drum machine.

So here's my drum machine here, to get onto my drum machine, I don't double click on here.

I click here, and this brings up my drum kit.

Don't worry, this looks a little bit complicated, so this is the default pattern they've chosen for us.

Maybe I want something a little bit more poppy.

I might also want to change the kit too.

what kind of kit? Maybe a rock kit, for example, I could do that one, or a pop rock, I'm going to do this one actually.

It sounds a bit more like a kind of acoustic band, so I'm quite happy with this one, so that's B.

I'm going to move this one over.

I like it, it sounds like a complete ban, so I'm just going to get rid of this one for now.

Oh, it's not going to let me, okay.

I have got my simple chords in the guitar, my bassline and my drums. I might now, 'cause I've recorded, this should keep it in, We'll just speed up to hear what it sounds like.

Maybe not fast enough.

Another option to get drums in is to use the loops, so I click at the bottom here on loops, and I can find a drum loop.

This one will be quite good, drum kit groove pack, and there are loads and loads of different genres in here, so what I might want to do is click on a genre, and I'll probably want to have pop or rock, and that's going to find all the beats for me.

And if I like the beat, I'm just going to click on it, and drag it to this section here, and here is my loop.

Okay? I would advise you not to spend too long looking at loops, because that's not the main part of this lesson today, but if we're not hearing the drum machine then this will be a good option for you.

You are now good to add a drum and bass part to your project, so remember, start with that bassline and duplicate your track for moving the notes, and make sure you bring it down an octave to make it lower.

Changing the instrument too, for the drums, use the drum machine or drum loop, but be careful not to spend too long, going through the loops.

This should take you 10 minutes, pause the video and resume when you're ready.

Great.

Now you have your complete virtual band or nearly complete.

I'd like you to reflect on these three questions, pause the video, refer to the questions and resume when you're ready.

Okay, for that pink box question, how do you know your parts fit together? I think there were two ways.

So firstly, using your ears and hearing, that they fit, but also you know they'll fit together because your bassline is from the chords, so you know it will fit.

We are now going to look at the accompaniment, so we're-- the whole band at the moment is the accompaniment, because we have the bass, drums, and the chords, I'm going to play you an example of an accompaniment on the keyboard, and I want you to tell me, how am I making my accompaniment more interesting, so here's the normal way.

Now I'm going to make it more interesting.

How have I made it more interesting? so I've done two things.

I have made the rhythm syncopated and dotted.

I can also make the accompaniment interesting by changing the texture, so I didn't show it to you just then, but I could start with this.

And then add another part.

For example.

I used a dotted rhythm, not a syncopated rhythm, but I could do a more syncopated rhythm like this, for example, and we might have covered that in another week.

I'm now going to show you on BandLab for Education, how to make your chords and your bass more interesting, so I'm now going to show you how to change the rhythm of the chords and the bass.

the first thing you need to do is you need to duplicate your track, so you right click on the track that you want to duplicate, so these are my chords, and then duplicate the track.

I'm going to rename it to rhythmic chords, I'm going to do the same with the bassline, while I remember, so a duplicate track, and it's rhythmic bassline.

Okay, let's go onto the chords, actually let's start with the bassline.

So, we've only got one note here, and it's at the first beat of the bar.

I'm now going to change this, so I have a different rhythm, so each one of these numbers, one, 1.

2, 1.

3, 1.

4 are the beats of the bar, so if I was to use my pencil tool, so you changed the pencil tool here.

You could click in, one on every beat like this, but maybe I want something a bit more interesting, so I could maybe, going to undo what I've just done.

I might want to be very syncopated, so if I want to be syncopated, I need to make sure I'm not right on that beat, so I could do here, and then I'm going to do here, I'm going to go four, and in between these two and three, should we listen to that now? To listen to it, I'm actually just going to solo it, so that means pressing the S button.

Oh, I like it.

Yeah, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to double click on this and I'm going to do the same.

Maybe I'm not going to do that for every single note, I'm just going to do it for two of them.

It's going to go duh, duh, duh, duhhh, and then going to do the same rhythm as before, I think I've done that wrong, so if I've done it wrong, I just need to click and move it.

Move it over here, here we go.

So if I listened to the whole thing.

Oh, I'm happy with that.

So that sounds good.

Now for the chords, I'm going to do something similar, so if you're feeling confident on your computer keyboard, you could just play in a different chord rhythm, that's absolutely fine.

However, you could also very easily change it on here, so again, I'm going to select the whole chord now, and then I can use these arrows to make it shorter.

I'm actually going to make some very short notes at the beginning, because I want a rhythm that's like that, dah dah dah dahh, dah dah.

I think that, I want something a bit more like that, so then what I can do is copy and paste my chords, rather than using the pencil each time, so I'm going to click on alt, I'm going to click and hold the chord, and now I've made a copy.

I'm going to do that again.

Is it a hard thing, yes.

So actually, no, I'm not going to do that one, I change my mind, so I'm going to just make four of them, so like this one and make it long, so then this is what my chords are going to sound like, I'm going to add that to my mix.

Oh, I like that one too, yeah? So if I'm feeling lazy, I could just copy that and copy that all across, or I can do the rest of my chord myself, so, experiment now with, making the notes longer or shorter, adding notes using the pencil tool, or copying and pasting notes and selecting them, using alt, clicking, and dragging across.

That's going to copy your notes.

You're now going to pause the video to complete this task by changing everything of your chords and bass, so you'll need to duplicate the tracks, and then alter the length of the note, just I showed you to create some more interesting rhythms. And if you find this too easy, then try and play an additional rhythm yourself, or even adding some different pitches to fit in.

Pause the video.

You should take 10 minutes to do this, and resume when you're finished.

Great, well done for your homework so far, you're now going to look through these three questions to reflect on your work you've done so far before I teach you how to share it.

I'm now going to show you how to show you how to share your virtual band, so when you share it, you could just send it to somebody for feedback.

You could share it with your school, for example, or you could actually show it live to somebody, so you could even play along with it at home.

I'm going to show you now how to extend your virtual bands a little bit for a bit of a longer time, as well as how to share it and download it on BandLab for Education.

So now I'm going to show you how to maybe make your work sound a bit more finished, and then how to share it with somebody else.

So if you wanted to play along with it, you can loop it, so it lasts for a really long time, by taking the top bit of each part, or if we're just going to have it loop around in circles, You click up here, and that basically means that this bit repeats over and over again.

If you have time, you might want to experiment, oops, with having different parts coming in at different times.

I'm going to turn this off, there we go, so for example, having the simple chords come in first, and then you'd move in the more exciting bassline, and chords a bit later, yeah, so you can maybe repeat this, so that you don't have them all coming in at once, so you could even start with the simple chords and bassline, get the bassline to be a bit more exciting, and then you have the simple chords later.

You could even have the drum bit come in later like this, and then actually have a way to experiment with moving things around, so this is what mine would sound like, so I have shown you a little bit, on how you can make your project have more variety, but if you don't have time to do that today, don't worry, that's fine.

You have done the main thing of creating a virtual band.

So to share the work, you need to go to file, download and mixdown us, so it will save for you, so mine's taking quite a long time, you might need to refresh your browser if you're in my situation, a book should come up and it would say MP3, I'm an option for MP3, so you'll click that one 'cause that's the one that you can send to the most people.

If you just wants to play along with the track, you don't need to do any of this.

You can just play it on BandLab and play along with it on your instrument.

Excellent work, I hope it went really well, the sharing, and I hope people are suitably impressed with your work, well done today.

So, we're now onto end of our lesson, and there are four questions about how we can play it in a virtual band.

I'd like you to pause the video, answer the questions, and resume when you are ready to finish.

Lovely, so for the last couple of questions, how did you make the layers interesting, I hope you changed the rhythms, potentially, and had them coming in at different times, it would've made it really, really interesting, well done.

The last thing for me to say, is you've learned a lot today, and you've learned a lot if you've been with me for the past few lessons, so do click on, and complete the quiz questions to show off how much you have learned.

All that's left for me to say is well done today, good job on BandLab for Education, through whatever device you chose, and take care and see you next time, bye.