Band Elective Feature: Pascale Villadolid, Nicey Ignacio, Clarise Alquitran, Willis Macaraig[1]
Songs they worked on together : Family is Love, Jingle Bell Rock
C is for taking on the Challenge: On the “Collab” Pathway
Clarise: “Family Is Love” is a Christmas station ID of ABS-CBN. The song is giving love and giving hope to the whole wide nation. It was a collaboration between me, Pascale and Nicey.
Pascale: Teacher Anto gave the track of Willis’ in the Google Drive
Willis: Teacher Anto had to make me play along with Pascale’s vocal track for… for the second time… part.
And I play along with 2 devices. Like a computer and a phone…phone recording was better and then I played along with the track on my computer.
Nicey: In my recording room, I have set of all my instruments po and set up my microphone, my mic stand and beat box and piano stand. All my instruments are set in record room.
TF: Yung Family is Love, may instruments ka ba dun?
N: Meron po kaming instrumentalist po sila Willis and Roj po.
TF: Yung para sa Family is Love, ano’ng part mo?
N: Ang part ko po, vocals po kami. For the start for the recording po, first time lang po yung submissions po. We create our vocals, all the friends with Clarise, Pascale and I. At first we give our opinion because I’m super talented.
C is for Building on Individual Competencies, Getting their Act Together
Nicey: First po, Teach, sabi ni Teacher Anto, to know how do we record songs. First, we practice it with them. And then, first I will sing it in Intro then I’m gonna sing it in chorus and the last part of the chorus.
Pascale: Well for the first time… well I was recording… I get confused with, um, from the beginning of Willis’ track.
The sound of Willis’ guitar is loud. I just had to stay calm and keep… keep…the track going until I finished the song.
And then after recording I sent it to Teacher Anto and Teacher Anto told me that the one that should be recorded is my voice. So, it’s just only me. He does not want to hear Willis’ track. That is why Willis’ track was on my earphones and then I recorded it again. It happens that we make mistakes. We are not perfect, Teach.
Clarise: For my part, Teacher Anto told me to backtrack for Pascale’s vocals. I listened to the song first. And then I kept on repeating and repeating on it. Cause I do not memorize the lyrics a lot. It took me a long time to memorize it. And then when I realized- when I know the tune already, I started to backtrack Pascale’s vocals. For the Family is Love recording, I used a camera to film my vocals.
Willis: The problem was my Christmas recording called Jingle Bell Rock because I had to play along with Pascale’s audio on my ASUS touchscreen laptop and record it with my phone for the audio part, but I felt better because I found a way to do it by working hard on the audio recording.
C is for More Challenges: Working Things Out & the Triumph of Persistence
Clarise: What was the difficult thing? Okay so I would say the most difficult – it was to merge all our audios. The easiest one is when we um- let me just think about it… the easiest part is when I was the only one who recorded it. We worked separately. It was really challenging for all of us in this kind of setup.
C: I submitted my recording to Teacher Anto to the Google Classroom in the band classroom and then that’s it.
It was like I was rushing rin, Teacher, when I recorded it. I wanted to meet the deadline so that I would not have any work to do after this class.
TF: Ilang beses ka nagpadala ng recording hanggang makuha na yung best?
Nicey: (Counts in whispers.) Mga four beses na po.
TF. Mga four times. Hanggang pinaka maganda na.
Nicey: Sinabi po ni T. Anto na magfocus ako sa hard work namin. Tapos record ako ng record, record ako ng record after all the songs I need about my submissions and research po.
Willis: The easy part in recording is… I… recorded it and submitted it. But the harder part is that it takes a little time, so I redo it again, so… A little time to put it together. Like I re-record it. T. Anto helped me by giving me advice. And then he gave me great advice and he told me to persist, so I persisted. And then, after that, it became even better than before!
Pascale: We were having a misunderstanding in the whole group. T. Anto heard about it. In the first time, I was mad at Nicey because Kendrick and Nicey were arguing while I’m focusing on my Acads. I told them to stop. They said they didn’t do anything wrong. After the misunderstanding, I chilled myself because I did the wrong thing. So, I apologized to her and we made up. Life has a lot of hard challenges but I can do it.
Collaboration, Cooperation, Confidence: The other Cs of Band Electives in the time of Covid-19
“I got a Feeling….!”
What did you feel- how did you feel working on this?
Pascale: I feel happy about it.
Clarise: So, it was a fun experience to gather with Willis, Kendrick, and Pascale.
Do you look forward to working on another piece?
Pascale: Yes!
Clarise: Yes!
TF: Ano naman yung pakiramdam mo na nakatrabaho mo si Clarise, si Pascale?
Nicey: First time lang po ako to work with them. And we have the copy of the Waymaker. And we always…after we have a class only to practice and practice. We need to show our voice, be beautiful and like that lang po.
Looking forward to More Work, More Joys
Can we look forward to another collaboration from Pascale, Clarisse, Willis?
Clarise: Yes, Teachers, we promise to give you another one!
Willis: Yeah!
You should think of another song…
Clarise: Yeah, to make you guys happy.
Willis: Yeah. We can plan it in our group chat.[2]
Did you imagine you could do this kind of work from home? This kind of recording. Did you imagine you could?
Pascale: Yes, we did.
Clarise: Yes.
Willis: Yes.
Clarise: It is challenging but it’s worth it.
Willis: What I learned was most important was that I learned how to cooperate with others during band projects, and during band projects I learned how to connect to other audios. I play along with it.
Pascale: I learned to… cooperate with a group. For the first time it’s not too easy to work with the group. A little… not too angry. It’s a little frustration. But since now I learned, I know how to cooperate with them. We are one big cooperative team, Teacher.
TF: May gusto ka bang sabihin sa mga kasama mo sa Band Elective? Anong gusto mong sabihin?
Nicey: Siguro po yung mga ka-bandmates ko po – super happy to see them ….and I am so happy and super, super proud of myself and with them in their performances in our class in Band Electives.
1This article is based on zoom interviews with Clarise, Pascale and Willis in one session (transcribed by Macy Abad, Gr12), with Nicey in a separate one (transcribed by Teacher Cindy), email follow-up questions for Pascale, Clarise and Willis by Teacher Feny. Then the draft article was put together by Teachers JJ, Zach and finally by Teacher Feny all throughout retaining all their words verbatim. Layout is by Teacher Grace.
2The “group chat” of the Band Elective is probably the longest running, most collaborative messenger group of CL HS students in the time of Covid-19. It has been their lifeline from the start of the lockdown during the Year-end classes for SY 2019-20, continued throughout the first Summer of Covid19 and keeps on going as a truly inclusive, highly functional, thriving community in CoL@Home SY2020-21.