Action for Children

For four weeks over the summer holidays, I, along with Marion from Action for Children, ran a music making and songwriting project at St. Thomas of Addiewell Primary School in West Lothian.

The first couple of weeks were filled with lots of fun games, drumming and forming a band to learn a cover of ‘Memories’ by Maroon 5. As it was so warm we also did lots of our sessions outside- jamming together and playing the ‘find the drumstick’ game.

We then decided that we would start to write our song together. We learned that Ben (AKA Benasaurus) knew lots about dinosaurs which we thought we could use to our advantage and decided we would write a rap song about dinosaurs and what it would be like if they were in a band.

Over the next few sessions we came up with different verses and chose which chords we wanted to use by hearing different styles and chord progressions on the guitar. We were lucky that in our band already, we had a guitar player, trumpet player, piano player and expert dinosaur impressionist which made it easy to decide which instruments and sounds to use.

In the last three sessions, we recorded ourselves playing the song on our different instruments and our singing and then I mixed and edited it together. After some notes from the band, we had a track we were happy with. However, we felt that every good song deserves to have a music video. So, Maya and Bartosz used their film making skills to film the dinosaur in different situations which was then later edited into our music video!

By Claire Docherty

Here’s the beautiful piece of music that came out of this project. “Not as fierce as they look”