Castleford Academy on BBC School News Report using Charanga’s VIP Studio Sessions

Castleford Academy took part in the BBC School Report News Day and chose to feature their House music competition which uses Charanga’s VIP.

On the 10th of March 2016, a group of students became reporters for the day and interviewed teachers and pupils to celebrate the school’s community work, their House music competition, their deaf department as well as their new 3G sports pitch.

Rosie Weatherley from the music department enthuses: “We were running the House music tutorials as a scheme of work with Year 7, with a competition to feature on a CD at the end. Well, it’s working really well and there’s a real buzz around the school about the competition. We’re also singing with each class and are recording a house remix of Adele’s ‘Hello’ which will feature on the CD.”

In the report we got to hear from Year 7 pupils taking part in their competition, where 20 of the best tracks made in VIP were to be featured on a schools compilation CD.

Asked when he got into House music one student said “When Miss Weatherly noticed there was a competition going on I thought I’d try getting in it because getting your song published is a really good thing and I’m really competitive”.

Students were asked how they felt about doing House music instead of more traditional types of music, and whether they thought it was important that the curriculum stayed up to date with new genres: one young woman said “It’s very important, everyone needs to know what the modern music is because a lot of people don’t really like old music.”

Another student felt that some more traditional music wasn’t really relevant to them, not being “today’s music”. He said VIP “will be good for us when we are older” helping to make music like what he hears on the radio, which he said was “more like Kanye West”.

They were asked if they find it easy to use the programme “Some steps are complicated and some steps are alright, and you can do it quite easily”. Others said “they enjoyed it a lot, especially doing it in music lessons”.

When asked for a favourite song in the genre one student said “Yeah I like Miss’s remix of Adele which she made using VIP”.

VIP Studio Sessions makes teaching new music genres easy:

• It has a built-in online studio that allows students to save work and even continue working online from home computers
• The step-by-step guides make learning music production in the classroom possible
• It covers a range of new music skills from building beats, chords and basslines through to writing lyrics and arranging tracks.