Variety - The progression of ideas

Following our previous performance of variety I didn't necessarily want to sing again. As I felt I relied on my voice a lot when it came to performances and following the months of my illness I didn't want to rely on it again.

Therefore, I started mind-mapping potential ideas that consisted of:

Comedy,
Drama
Voice
Instrumentals
Dance

The theme for our variety night was 'Cabaret' so I thought I could possibly perform a musical number whether it would be on my voice or on a instrument. Following this I researched into different musicals as I wanted to perform a piece of music that wasn't cliché but people would recognise that it would be from a musical. After this i then decided that instead of performing one whole song I could perform little snippets from a few numbers and create a musical mashup on the piano. In order to help aid me and give me a starting point I searched for musical mashups that had already been created to get an understanding of how to structure my performance.

I stuck with this idea for a few days. However, I very quickly realised without the aid of sheet music that it would be hard to learn the pieces themselves let alone create a mashup. Therefore, I concluded that doing a musical mashup wouldn't be for me.

Later on in the next lesson I went off into a room by myself to try and figure out what I would be doing. I wanted to play an instrument but didn't know quite what to do yet. My friend Harry then suggested that I do a mashup of non-musical songs. Play songs that people would know and potentially get them to sing if I didn't want to myself. I felt more confident with this idea as I previously knew a few pop songs on piano that people generally know and with a little work could make them into a mashup. I then spent that lesson playing 'Apologise' by One Republic and 'Numb' by Linkin Park trying to find a good place in the songs to cross over to the other. However, this was a little difficult as they were in different keys and tended to have very different melodic tunes. However, I was determined to stick with the idea of doing a mashup of pop songs that people would recognise as my act.



I then went home and started playing some different instruments (guitar/ukulele) as pop songs tend to be transposed into similar chords to one another. I picked up my Ukulele and started to play 'Elastic Heart' by Sia. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of mixing up song lyrics and combining two songs without realising and this is what happened. I was in the middle of singing 'Elastic Heart' by Sia and then went into 'Bad Blood' by Taylor Swift. I then looked up the chords to both songs making sure I  was singing both of the songs in the right key and making sure the chords were the same. They were. I then had the task of ordering what parts of the songs I would sing where. I decided that I would start with 'Elastic Heart' and only go into 'Bad Blood' as i was building up to the chorus to then make it more of a surprise to the audience when I performed it. I then continued this into the first verse of 'Bad Blood' with a typical strum, slap on my ukulele to give it more of an edgy vibe and to create a little bit of difference from what I had previously sung. Also to give emphasis that this is currently a different song. After running this a few times I wanted to add another song into the mix to make it that more interesting and keep the audience aurally engaged. From previous knowledge I knew that 'Say Something' from A Great Big World had the same chords just in a different order. Therefore, i added this into the mix changing up the chord patter and slightly changing the melody in order for it to fit the tempo of the previous songs. Then to add a little flair at the end I added a one liner from 'The Cup Song'. To give it a nice finish but to also give it that one last push to make it seem interesting and different.