What Makes a Good Song? Knowledge Organiser

Exploring Popular Songs

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What Makes a Good Song? - Cover and Homework Activities

What Makes a Good Song? - Popular Songs Case Studies

What Makes a Good Song? - Scheme of Work and Lesson Pathways

What Makes a Good Song? - Scheme of Work and Lesson Pathways

Includes Scheme of Work Overview, Unit Learning Objectives, Learning Outcomes and Lesson Pathways.

What Makes a Good Song? - General Resources

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What Makes a Good Song? - DOITNOW (Starters) and Plenary Activities

What Makes a Good Song? - “DOITNOW” Presentation

Cutting down on printables, file storage and media files, the “new look” Musical Contexts “DOITNOW” What Makes a Good Song? lesson openers Presentation contains  a wealth (only two samples shown here), of effective “DOITNOW’s” when delivering the What Makes a Good Song? unit in just one place - all audio and video files are embedded and there’s accompanying Teacher’s Notes in the “slide comments” section. 

What Makes a Good Song? - Plenary Review Activities

A series of lesson reviews where pupils review their learning and understanding.

What Makes a Good Song? - 5 Minutes Silent Reading

For teachers who prefer to begin their lessons with quiet, focused openers.  All contain “Questions to Think About” which can also be used as Cover or Homework tasks.

1. What Makes a Good Song?

2. Song Structure

3. Lead Sheets

4. Primary and Secondary Chords

5. Song Textures

6. Song Timbres and Sonorities

What Makes a Good Song? - Music Theory and Melodic Dictation

What Makes a Good Song? Theory - Melodic Motion: Conjunct and Disjunct

Exploring melody lines in songs from different times and places in terms of melodic motion and movement using the terms Conjunct (stepwise) and Disjunct (leaps)

What Makes a Good Song? — Melodic Dictation

Treble clef melodic dictation from riffs and melodies of famous popular songs. 

Answers provided.  All of the accompanying audio extracts are provided on the audio file. 

What Makes a Good Song? - Performing Resources (Popular Songs Lead Sheets)

This unit consists of a series of short, structured, exploratory and investigatory activities into the genre of popular song in terms of the different structural, textural and elemental components in order to provide a more in-depth answer to the unit’s title: ‘What Makes a Good Song?’

The unit focuses primarily on popular songs and where possible, pupils should be given the opportunity to sing all of the songs explored.

Pupils explore song structure and how a typical popular song is made up of different structural elements before exploring (or revisiting) primary (I, IV, V and V7) and secondary chords (VI), song textures and  instruments, timbres and sonorities used to accompany popular songs.  Hooks are Riffs in popular songs are explored briefly and this provides a good foundation for the future study of the Musical Contexts “Hooks and Riffs” unit that covers the use of Hooks and Riffs in popular music in greater detail. 

Through a series of performing and listening tasks, pupils use lead sheets of popular songs to perform parts from and to analyse musical features from which introduces them to this form of musical notation. 

Two ‘good’ songs have been chosen as case studies within this unit: “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran and “Shotgun” by George Ezra although these can be replaced depending on individual teacher preference.

This is not a “songwriting” unit, but through the exploration and analyses of popular songs, it does provide valuable skills, knowledge and understanding to prepare pupils to create their own complete musical arrangement of a song which is covered within the Musical Contexts “Making Arrangements” unit.