Review: A Cappella + Beatboxing Workshop

Last week, Nicole led the second workshop of our series, A Cappella + Beatboxing!

The week was filled with practicing many different technical and improvisational skills, and participants learned a lot about how to arrange a song for voices.  After our first day, we decided that we would work on arranging and learning Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine”.  Learning this song led us to pursue a more jazzy sound in our warm-ups and improvisational exercises, and we focused a lot on scat singing and short, repetitive phrases.

Ain’t No Sunshine

Here, you can see the group in the middle of an improvisation exercise in which they closed their eyes and created their own sounds in response to the sounds of the room and each other, naturally creating crescendos and decrescendos over several minutes.

The group also worked on beatboxing, using several different songs as guides, and eventually becoming comfortable enough to come up with their own unique beats.

The week closed with a brief final rehearsal of “Ain’t No Sunshine”, during which the group applied everything they had learned about syllable and scat singing to emulate the sounds of the guitar, bass, strings, and drums in the song.  Our group was immensely talented and loads of fun, and it was a week very well spent with music and beats!

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Our workshops continue this week with Tech Week and next week with Jam Week!  All workshop sessions will run from 4PM to 5PM, Monday through Friday, and are free for all MRC members.  See below for more details!

THIS WEEK (7/23-7/27): TECH WEEK!!

Each day of the workshop will focus on a different aspect of technology in music and be led by a guest instructor.

Mon.  7/23- DJ Mudita on DJ’ing

NEXT WEEK (7/30-8/3): JAM WEEK!!