Planning and rehearsal of ensemble performance

In the first lesson, we had to discuss as a group what songs we wanted. Each person wanted something different so it took quite a bit of time to find two songs we were all happy with. After the first lesson, we only decided that we wanted one Musical Theatre song and one Pop song.

Over the next few lessons, we seemed to have settled on singing Love Me Like You by Little Mix (the Pop song) and Opening Up from Waitress the Musical (the Musical Theatre song).

When we chose our Musical Theatre song, Waitress the Musical hadn't yet opened on the West End but the soundtrack had been out for about four years and could be streamed on multiple platforms and had been very successful. 

Alex took it upon herself to go through the sheet music for Opening Up and highlight each line a different colour according to who would be singing what. We decided to sing the three part harmonies and do the call and response part at the end of the song. It worked out very well after some practise which showed what we are capable of as a group.

For Love Me Like You, we went through the lyrics and decided who would be singing what verse  and the overlapping parts. For both songs, we tried our best to make sure each person had their moment to shine/ their solo and had equal parts. Over all the weeks, practising singing our part over everyone else's parts has developed our ears to be able to focus on what we need to sing without getting distracted/ put off by what everyone else is singing.

We formed as a Musical Theatre vocal group to play to our strengths, singing over backing tracks. We always had group rehearsals as that was the most effective way of rehearsing (rather than sectional since we were all singing together).

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