Step Back Baby: Teaching ti-tika and tika-ti
Using our voice to discover new rhythms
My last few blog posts have been about more complicated rhythms and how we can guide our students to discover them using a Kodály inspired approach. The most important element of the Kodály approach is singing, using our voice. It really comes into its own with the rhythm that appears in the song Step Back Baby.
In this blog I’ll take you through a way you can teach it to your students. Do adapt these ideas to suit your students. A step could be in one week or if your students are older or more advanced, they might be able to do more.
Step One Baby! Learn the song
It’s a call and response song, so you can introduce it by singing the call and your students sing back the response, “Step Back Baby Step Back”
Here are the words and a demo of the first line so you can hear the melody. Every line follows the same tune.
Can you do it with this body ostinato?
Repeat the call and response while doing the body ostinato with your students. If they can do this well, ask them to sing the whole thing with the body ostinato.
Beat and Rhythm
Clap the rhythm of this line:
Open up the door and let them in
Now let’s tap the beat on our beat fingers…
Then we’ll put the rhythm on our beat fingers.
Do any of our beats have any of our more advanced rhythms?
Which beats?
Beat one!
Let’s sing beat one in our thinking voice (repeat the line with beat one in your thinking voice and beats 2 3 and 4 in singing voice)
How many sounds on beat one? (four)
Are the sounds even or uneven? (even)
So what are four even sounds on the beat? (tika-tika!)
Now let’s reveal the rhythm:
So four even sounds on the first beat, one sound at beat four and we call it ta, two sounds on beats two and three and we beam them together to show they belong together and we say “titi” and the four even sounds are also beamed together but to show they aren’t quavers but are twice the speed, we draw another beam. We have semi-quavers!
Now let’s say the rhythm names:
Tika-tika titi titi ta
Here’s another line:
Not last night but the night before
Let’s tap the beat on our beat fingers and sing this line. (In the same way we did above)
Then put the rhythm on our beat fingers.
Which beat has our advanced rhythm?
(The second beat)
Let’s sing it again and put the second beat in our thinking voice.
Let’s do it again.
How many sounds on our mystery beat?
(3)
Are they even or uneven?
(uneven)
What pattern of long and and short have we got?
We could have… long short short, short short long, short long short…
Let’s check… (repeat the line with rhythm on beat fingers)
(long short short)
What can we call a rhythm with a pattern on long short short?
(ti-tika)
Note: our students know titi and tika-tika so have the knowledge to work this out. Obviously add more microsteps if needed!
So half of the beat is ti (a quaver) and the other is a tika (two semiquavers) and it has two beams.
Let’s say the rhythm of this one:
Titi ti-tika titi ta
Let’s look at the next phrase:
Twenty four robbers at my door
Make sure you put it on beat fingers as we did above.
Where’s the tricky rhythm? (beat one)
Put it in your thinking voice and sing the other beats.
Are they even or uneven? (uneven)
What pattern of long and short? (short short long)
Short short long is harder because if we say “twenty four”, there’s no long sound at the end. If we played it on a drum, you’d just hear three equal sounds. It’s the same problem with titi ta – if you play titi ta on claves, it makes three identical sounds; the longer sound can’t be sustained and out of context … so we need to put it in context so that we can hear it there’s nothing else in the bar and it’s a longer sound. A hard one! This is why it’s so useful to say rhythm with singing, rather than percussion instruments.
Let’s keep investigating the rhythm of Step Back Baby…
Here’s the rhythm for twenty four robbers:
So we’ve had tika-tika, ti-tika and now we have tika-ti!
Last rhythm:
Some ran over the cuckoo’s nest
Now let’s sing it on beat fingers to work out the rhythm.
Which beat has a tricky rhythm? (two)
Let’s put it in our thinking voice
How many sounds? (three)
Are they even or uneven? (uneven)
What pattern of long and short is it? (short short long)
So tika-ti again!
Let’s say the rhythm of this line:
Titi tika-ti titi ta
Reading Rhythm
Here are all of the rhythms in context:
It’s just half of the song so it’s not squashed in!
You can see the difference between four semiquavers (tika-tika) and four quavers (titi titi) grouped into fours. So we need to have introduced four beamed quavers before we introduce tika-tika so our students are looking at the fact there are two beams for a semi-quaver, not that four notes are beamed together.
Let’s round off what we’ve discovered by saying the rhythm of the whole thing:
Titi ti-tika titi ta titi titi titi titi (sh)
Tika-ti titi titi ta titi titi titi titi (sh)
Tika-tika titi titi ta titi titi titi titi (sh)
Tika-tika ti-tika titi ta titi titi titi titi (sh)
Here’s the whole song:
As you can see a lot of the rest is just titi titi titi ta. The most interesting rhythms are in the first part.
Ostinato
Let’s use the first half and do some fun things.
We’ll go back to our body ostinato and see if we can say the rhythm names.
More Ideas
You can play some other games with this song…
Here are the rhythms we’ve done so far:
You can use these rhythms to play Rhythm Dominoes: Give your students some paper two write down a four beat rhythm using these rhythms. Tell them not to make it too easy or too difficult!
Once they’ve written down their rhythms, you can start the game. Pick a student to say their rhythm and then you say the last student’s rhythm and your rhythm. The next person says your rhythm and their rhythm. Each person is only saying two sets of four beat rhythms. You could even play the game with improvised pitch using la so and mi.
This is a great song because it’s easy for young children to sing it, but it suits older children really well:
- There’s nothing in the lyrics that are babyish.
- The step back baby step back lyrics followed by the rest are funky for older children.
- The rhythms are also more complicated so there’s lots we can do with it but the toneset is still only la so and mi so it’s not venturing far from our tone set.
- It’s almost a chant with a bit of melody. So reluctant singers might enjoy it. It will also definitely work as a chant if you have a class that really won’t sing.
What do you think to this song? Let me know if you use it in your classes and if you have any other songs that suit older children well.
Want more advice and ideas?
If you found this blog useful. Please comment below if you did or if there is anything you would like to say to me about it. If you’d like to find out more about preparing your students to learn about pitch and much more, including over a year’s worth of lesson plans for teaching all the important musical skills with Helen’s clear microsteps, why not try out Doremi Membership for 14 days for just £1?
[…] the last blog post (catch-up here), we talked about teaching more complex rhythms: ti-tika and tika-ti. And before that, I’ve […]