Rattly Old Car

School Radio > Music > Join in with Music

This short piece provides a background framework for pupils to improvise sounds and patterns inspired by the story of a rattly old car.

The video

Rattly Old Car

This short piece provides a background framework for children to improvise sounds and patterns inspired by the story of a rattly old car, rusting away in a farmyard in North America, and trying to get it started. The music has a 12-bar blues feel and features twangy sounds - such as banjo and dobro guitar - plus many kinds of percussion clanks, which you can all interpret in your own way, using whatever instruments can be found in your school.

• Voices and mouth sounds can play a great part, especially twangs, clanks, mechanical rhythm patterns, half starting or going slightly wrong; also vocal arpeggios going up and down to fit with patterns in the backing track; also whooshes, hisses and huffing-puffing sounds.
• Body percussion can contribute clapping patterns and rhythms - solo or in duets - finger-clicks, taps on the head, cheeks, chest, thighs and knees.
• Among instruments, metal sounds are particularly suitable - eg triangles, bells, cymbals, tambourines and glockenspiels - to suggest squeaky wheels, gears and cogs turning.
• Wooden xylophones, woodblocks, castanets and claves can provide zig-zaggy mechanical sounds, trying to get going.
• Shakers, maracas, cabaças and medium size drums might play patterns to evoke puffs of smoke and steam.
• Low drums can play rolling sounds, like engine rumbles getting louder and then quieter.
• Ukuleles and guitars can twang their open strings in time in a few places. Listen and see what fits in. They might also experiment with bluesy bottleneck playing, plucking the strings as normal but sliding the back of a spoon up and down the fingerboard at the same time. They could also try out different ways of picking the strings to sound like a banjo, played ‘clawhammer’ style.
• Violins and cellos might create some similar effects, plus interesting pizzicato plinks and plonks.
• Keyboards and piano can provide rumbly, tickly and rattly textures, as well as a few bluesy or boogie-woogie phrases.

Resources

School Radio > Music > Join in with Music