Anyone who inadvertently lands upon this blog as they wander the net will know that I have been banging on about language teachers and singing. I have mentioned that every UK language teacher ought to sign up for a FREE account with the Sing Up website. I thought I would put up today's post to convince anyone who hasn't yet done so.
4 times a year, Sing Up send out a really useful magazine to subscribers, one of whose features is an accompanying CD with a selection of the music freely available to download from their website.
In the Summer 2010 issue, there was this useful article about how to adapt some of this material for your own use. you could apply this to all the other posts I have put up about building a bank of your favourite backing tracks to support your teaching. For example in the current winter issue there is a full arrangement of Queen's "We are the the Champions". You get the backing track of this for free.
The CD with the 2010 Summer issue included a beautiful 3 part African lullaby called Souallé. I took the 3 part melody, used the free musical backing track and put French lyrics to the tune to create a 3 part French Christmas Carol, "Dors,dors,dors petit fils"
With apologies for the recording quality and my own less than perfect vocals, here is what the vocal track sounds like in French
Download Dors Dors Dors French vocals.mp3
Here are the lyrics. The colour coding indicates where the text is repeated on the harmonies. A download link to the text is below.
Download Dors dors petit fils lyrics
Download Dors dors petit fils with english translation
Below you have the 3 vocal harmony parts with download links : the 3 backing track harmony parts : and finally the full backing track
i) the top vocal melody
Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils vocals top melody vocal.mp3 (3411.3K)
ii) the middle vocal melody
Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils vocals middle melody vocal.mp3 (3411.3K)
iii) the bass vocal melody
Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils vocals bass melody vocal.mp3 (3411.3K)
Here are the 3 backing track melodies
Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils top melody.mp3 (3478.7K)
ii) the middle backing melody
Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils middle melody.mp3 (3478.7K)
iii) the bass backing melody
Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils bass melody.mp3 (3478.7K)
And finally the full backing track
Download Dors Dors Dors petit fils backing.mp3 (6952.3K)
If you think teaching this yourself might be too much of a challenge, why not pass it over to a music teacher and see if they couldn't use it?
Alternatively try and just use two parts, the main melody and the middle melody.
Let me know if you use this in school. You can send me links to audio/video recordings of any performances in the comments boxes as I moderate all comments and will not publish any links unless expressly asked to do so.
