Deembe Music

Category: Music

  • Practice recording

    Today I turned my attention to getting comfortable with the change of key of my backing track for a performance of ‘I’m a Believer’.


    Having determined that, as a Bass, I didn’t want to sing higher than D4 I lowered the pitch by 2 semitones to make the key F (Mixolydian).

    I did a warm up and then a few run throughs before making a rough test recording. That turned out better than it felt to sing to be honest. I was pretty much managing to reach the D with the occasional duff note even going to Eb.

    Listening to that rough recording left me with some performance notes referencing our Sing Pop learning, mainly around timbre and onsets.

    Transpired that I was not capturing the melody correctly, especially around the flattened 7th in the verse and the high notes in the chorus.

  • Backing Vocals with Actions

    Backing Vocals with Actions

    Singing and Movement?!

    Back to Halifax for another Sing Pop active learning lesson session on Backing Vocals. 

    We chose two of our tracks to work on and first identified the nature of the backing vocals and where they fit.

    Then we turned attention to performance and what movements to introduce to accompany the vocals.  This is of course well out of our comfort zone but it generated quite a few laughs.  We will not be a metaphoric Pips to Gladys Night but I can see how synchronized movement from us backing vocalists will add to the entertainment!

    Two of us sang our lead parts as the backing vocalists practiced and then we swapped roles, sang the backing and threw some shapes!

    Quite looking forward to trying backing vocals. I think that I have had a minor backing role once with Olivia’s students but cannot recall the detail.

  • Concert Rehearsals

    Concert Rehearsals

    The antidote to the madness in today’s world is getting together and singing some Soul classics with like minded folk.

    This week we turned attention to the set-list for our forthcoming concert at Marsden in April.

    First up though we acknowledged the birthday of of Soul legend, Aretha Franklin by singing ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’ and ‘I Say a Little Prayer’.

    Another fun, music and laughter filled evening led by Dan Price, his guitar and Peter Kay like tales!

  • Backing Vocals

    Backing Vocals

    After our December Sing Pop student showcase performances, at The Blind Pig in Sowerby Bridge, we were set the challenge of picking two songs from a function band set-list. One to sing ourselves and suggestion(s) for our fellow singers. I chose the original version of ‘Valerie’ by the Zutons and accepted the challenge of ‘I’m a Believer’ by The Monkees.

    We have been using those songs to test various techniques that we have been learning in 2025.

    We have now moved on to learning about backing vocals and again using the chosen songs to explore the opportunities to add them.

  • Song practice

    Song practice

    When learning a song, even if I’m going to be singing it to a backing track as in this case, I like to explore the song on guitar and occasionally on keyboard. Besides adding interest, I find that approaching the song from different perspectives helps with memorising the structure, lyrics and helps to cement a chosen performance style.

    For The Monkees ‘I’m a Believer’ cover, that I working on for Sing Pop, I’m transposing from the key of G to F for my vocal so also practicing the accompaniment on guitar in F.

    I started learning the song using Justin Sandercoe’s video, one of my regular go to resources.

    This time though I am also using the excellent, local to me, Kirklees Guitar School‘s video / PDF which had recently been shared with somewhat spooky serendipity!

  • Deembe Music Website

    This WordPress website is now live having replaced the Google Sites version.

    This will now be used to record all new musical adventures from March 2025 onwards.

    This version is enabling a chronological news blog to sit alongside the less changeable scrapbook content.

    This is the fourth (and last!) incarnation of my musical adventures scrapbook. It started out when I maintained a parallel scrapbook on Pinterest for CSI:Halifax Choir. I then progressed to use Adobe Portfolio, as I had a Community Cloud subscription for photography. When I cancelled that I moved the scrapbook to Google Sites and from there on to here using WordPress.