Scratch recording students on the cheap without a lot of fuss.

Wildcat's Roar




Necessity is the mother of invention and in preparation for our annual round of standardized tests, I wanted to record my students as they chanted a rap that I wrote for them last year. 

Last year because of time I had no choice but to circulate a recording of me rapping..... no one wants to hear me rap..... so I knew that it was not a permanent solution.

I don't know about ya'll but sometimes my to do list doesn't fit in the hours I've been given, so it was REALLY close to testing time and I was faced with a choice.... suffer through another year of listening to myself rap on the announcements

for 3 weeks OR record my students....... Since I didn't suddenly wake up with a recording studio in my classroom I had to get creative. 

Here is what I did. 

1. I used one of my classroom macbooks. 

2. I opened up a track that included the instrumental loops that I h

ad used when I recorded the vocals originally.
3. I connected and then "

daisy-chained" 2 headphone splitters so that as many as 12 students could listen to the accompaniment at once and be free to record vocals,
4. I asked groups of volunteer 3rd,4th and 5th graders to come to the music room and take turns laying down tracks. 
5. Each time I would record a new vocal track, I would mute it so that the next group could match their voices to the original.
6. Then using Garage Band, I balanced the voices and mixed the tracks down to one.....

Not perfect, but sooooo much better than what I had before.