Developing Our Soul Piece

I say developing but really what happened is we scrapped the entire thing and started again.

Upon meeting up and rehearsing 'Brave' we felt restricted. The song was limiting what we could do with harmonies. We wanted a solid soul piece and we couldn't achieve some of the key elements of soul with this piece. We added 7ths and 9ths to the original melody, hoping that including jazz chords would give the piece a more swing vibe, however it just didn't blend with our voices and our harmonies needed more scoops in the voice and more 'doo wops'. So we ditched it and returned to the drawing board.

Our initial plan had been to devise a Motown piece, we had re-arranged the melody of Ellie Goulding's 'Burn' (2013) and added stronger, more fitting harmonies. We realised that it may be easier to transform this piece into our Soul performance, allowing us to keep all the work we had done creating our scooping, doo-wop harmonies which were a key feature of soul music that we'd struggled to achieve with 'Brave'. We slowed down the track as the original is an upbeat pop song in the key of  B♭ minor (B-flat minor.) and added backing vocals behind the lead melody. We were lucky in that the lyrics to 'Burn' also hold a social comment, necessary in a soul piece. The song is about empowerment and being strong and lighting the metaphorical fire within and allowing it to burn - hence the name of the song. This is expressed through lyrics such as "We don't have to worry 'bout nothing" which shows confidence. "They're gonna see us from out of space" shows that opinions will be seen and heard. "Strike the match, play it loud" is encouraging people to stand out and do what they want.

After analysing the lyrics and agreeing the song was appropriate for the genre we created a backing track on garage band. We used a saxophone and other jazz instruments as well as recording a piano and guitar part. This means we can perform the song as was typical of a soul performance and not play instruments on stage so that the focus is entirely on our vocals and harmonies.