Shadows At Night

Songwriting projects are one of the staples of the Tinderbox creative music offerings. They are a brilliant way to show how everyone has an abundance of musical creativity, no matter what age, experience or background. It’s also very handy if you have a large team of experienced musicians and an entire orchestra to add into the mix once you have a finished song.

Lockdown presented a great many challenges, but also some surprising opportunities. The Shadows At Night songwriting project has been one of these opportunities.

At the very beginning of lockdown we started a songwriting group as part of our online music school. We quickly found that the Zoom chat function is an ideal way to collaborate on lyric writing. Over 3 or 4 sessions the young people came up with the lyrics, melody and structure of the song.

Once we had a rough recording of the song to click track we were able to take it to the Tinderbox Online Orchestra who were rehearsing every week. We shared the recording on Zoom audio and had a few practices through the track. Then orchestra members recorded themselves improvising along to the track on their phones or whatever recording device they had to hand, and sent in their recordings. The tracks were then compiled, edited and mixed by Garry Boyle at Slate Room Studio. All this happened within the space of a week!

We were so excited by the end result that we decided to take it further and asked Dominika Jackowska to facilitate a project to produce an animation for the song. Dominika is part of our Tinderbox Lab project and had been working on animation for online game design projects. She led a series of workshops to enable young people to generate the content for the animation and also to show them how the animation process works.

It has been such a rewarding project and we hope you enjoy checking out the song!

Thanks to everyone involved including the Tinderbox Songwriting group, Tinderbox Orchestra and Dominika Jackowska. Special mentions to Sophie for lyrical inspiration and Julia Dorozynska on lead vocals.