Sing Sing Sing Play-Along for Jazz Appreciation Month
From 2022:
This is another attempt at creating a play-along video with floating notation and boomwhacker colors. This is a recording by The United States Army Field Band. Resources are included below along with a link to the original video.
April is Jazz Appreciation Month and when I wrote in the Midnight Music Community (https://midnightmusic.com.au/) where I am the coordinator of the community page and asked about attempting another play-along with notation video, a suggestion was a jazz song for April. I took the suggestion and created this one with the Sing Sing Sing recording by The United States Army Field Band. It is not perfect and I apologize for the imperfections. I am still working on the video creation process for floating notation with boomwhacker colors.
Process for Creating a Floating Notation Play-Along Video
A few weeks ago, I created a play-along video with floating notation to Ravel’s Bolero. it was quite a time-consuming task and when published, I was honest to say that it was not perfect, that it jumped the beat a few times, and that it was an attempt at leveling up my play-along videos from rhythm notation to floating notation with boomwhacker colors.
Though that video had its challenges, it was well-received and viewed many times. I decided to try again to see if I could improve the process. This time, I picked a shorter song and recording. The Army Field Band had a great recording of Sing Sing Sing. However, it was fast. I downloaded the video and slowed down the tempo using video editing software (I use Final Cut Pro). In Final Cut Pro, it has a function built-in where you can customize the speed of the video. I am happy to say that when you slow it down, you do not change the pitch of the video.
After I slowed it down, I had to adapt the melody for upper elementary. I could identify the key and wrote out a simplified melody.
A portion of the melody used in the video.
Recording the Play-Along
With the melody notated in Flat.io (educational version), I changed the note heads to boomwhacker colors and note names written into the note heads, as seen below.
I then screen recorded Flat playing the song using Loom as my screen recording tool. From there, I downloaded the video from Loom and placed it into Final Cut Pro. The Army Field Band video and the Flat video were not in synch. However, using the tool I used earlier to customize the speed of the video, I synched up the two videos. I did have to tweak some parts that got off slightly, but was happy with the results.
Canva
Finally, I used Canva to create boomwhacker notes so that when the cursor went over the note head, the note would pop up. I did this by taking screenshots of each note in Flat, bringing it into Canva (using a poster template), and then using the edit tool to remove the background from the image. This took some time as I had to remove the staff and that meant using the erase tool in the background remover to get that done. Update in 2023: I can now use the Magic Eraser instead of using the Background Remover with the erase tool. See my past week’s blog post for more information about this!
Once done, I exported the video from Final Cut Pro and uploaded it to YouTube. It is not perfect and has some parts that should synchronize better. But, I will continue to try and create these videos better as practice makes better.
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Resources
Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_napNH0D0Ws
The Jazz Ambassadors present Sing Sing Sing, composed by Louis Prima and arranged by Jeff Hest.
It features Sgt. 1st Class Bradford Danho on clarinet and Staff Sgt. Wes Anderson on drums. http://www.armyfieldband.com http://www.youtube.com/ArmyFieldBand http://www.facebook.com/ArmyFieldBand http://twitter.com/armyfieldband https://www.instagram.com/armyfieldband/ http://www.facebook.com/thesixstrings...
For more information visit our website or contact: Educational Activities Coordinator The United States Army Field Band 4214 Field Band Drive STE 5330 Fort Meade, Maryland 20755-7055 #jazz #bigband #armymusic Music in this video Learn more Listen ad-free with YouTube Premium Song Sing Sing Sing Artist Glenn Miller Orchestra Writers Louis Prima Licensed to YouTube by UMG (on behalf of Koch Music); CMRRA, SOLAR Music Rights Management, Forward Music Publishing Co., Ltd., MINT_BMG, Sony ATV Publishing, and 8 Music Rights Societies