4/1/16
Today was our first day back and we got put into our groups. I got put into a group with Pete, Ed and Georgina. Pete can play the piano and the accordion, Ed can sing and play the drums and Georgina can sing and play the guitar. After we got put into our groups, we started to decide what we should choose for our 3 song to play in the concert. We all managed to agree on 3 song to play. They are "Little Talks" by Of Monsters And Men, "Walking On Sunshine" by Katrina And The Waves and "How To Save A Life" by The Fray.
6/1/16
Today we started to learn our first song, "Little Talks". Progress was quite slow to start with as we had to establish how the song actually went. After listening to the song a number of times, we decided that we should all go home and learn our parts of the song in our own time.8/1/16
Today we all came back together to see if we could rehearse our first song "Little Talks". After learning our own parts in our own time, we were able to have a good rehearsal. I would say we managed to play a good third of the song. We were able to play the chorus and we all could play the verses very basically. We were extremely pleased with as this was our first rehearsal. We are all excited to rehearse more of the song in the next lesson.15/1/16
Today we had a double lesson so we managed to get a lot done. We managed to learn even more of the song today. We all know how to play our own parts of the song and we all know how the song goes. Because of this we are making amazing progress with our first song "Little Talks". We are all excited to learn the last parts of the song so that we will be able to play the whole song all the way through. We have another double lesson tomorrow so we think that we can learn the last parts in tomorrow's lesson.16/1/16
Today we, again, had another double lesson. We have managed to achieve our goal to learn the last parts of the song "Little Talks" by the end of today's lesson. We can now play the whole of the song all of the way through with minimal mistakes. We are extremely pleased with how quickly we have been able to play the song together. We are always thinking about our next song so if we can learn our other two songs as quickly as we have learned "Little Talks" then we will be in a very good position.21/1/16
Today we started to learn our second song of the three, "How To Save A Life" by The Fray. We managed to start learning the song all together as an ensemble and we were able to play the first verse however we had to play the song in one key lower than the real song to make it easier for Ed to sing. We are finding this song a lot harder to learn than "Little Talks".
27/1/16
Today we continued with "How To Save A Life" and we are now making good progress. We managed to play most of the song with just a few tweaks that we need to make. We are please with our progress in just one lesson. Hopefully we will manage to play the whole song soon.4/2/16
Today we had another double lesson so we had a group meeting for the first lesson. In the second lesson, however, we managed to get some rehearsal time. We managed to practice "How To Save A Life" to learn some more of the chorus of the song and "Little Talks". After this we then went to learn "Walking On Sunshine" and we managed to learn the basics for the while song in this lesson. All we have to do is add drums and guitar and we would have finished all three of our songs. All we would have to do after this is polish our songs to a standard that we all agree is good.8/2/16
Today we managed to practice our third song "Walking on Sunshine". This was the first time I had attempted to play the song however I have listened to the song many times before so I knew how the drums in the song went so this was not an issue. It was beneficial that I had already known how the song was played because before I implemented the drums into the song, the rest of the group kept playing the song out of time and they kept playing the wrong parts in the incorrect places. Once I added the drums, we managed to play the song the whole way through. Although we made a few mistakes, we managed to play the song really well which gives me confidence that a bit more rehearsal will make the song perfect. After we practiced "Walking On Sunshine" we moved onto practice "How to Save A Life" which I now feel is one of our stronger songs. We have now almost perfected the song now due to the fact that the verses and choruses repeat themselves however we still do make extremely small mistakes that we need to get out of the habit of making. Once we have done this we will be in a good position with all three of our songs.25/2/16
Today we continued with all three of our songs. We all feel like we are really close to perfecting all three of our songs. We all agree that our weakest song is "Walking On Sunshine". We now aim to focus on "Walking On Sunshine", because we keep making silly mistakes when rehearsing this song, and decide how we will structure our performance as a whole. We decided that "Little Talks" would be our opening song and that this would be followed by "How To Save A Life" because this would break up our performance with the juxtaposition of joyful and sad songs next to each other. We then all agree that "Walking On Sunshine" will be our last song because we want to end our set on a high and this is the perfect song to do it.
3/3/16
Today we mainly focused on our third song, "Walking On Sunshine". We feel that, as an ensemble, we have pretty much perfected the song and now we just need to make a few tweaks to our individual performances as part of an ensemble for example, I need to add in some more interesting drum fills into the song. After this, we would have perfected all three of our songs. Also today we finalized the plans that we had made in our previous lesson about structuring our set.
4/3/16
Today we again focused on our third song, "Walking On Sunshine", this was simply the song that we feel is our weakest out of the three even though all of our song are now practiced well and we feel confident with all of them. We will probably now start practicing all of our songs as a set with dialog in between each song just as it would be for the real thing. The concert is now approaching ever closer and we all are feeling confident with our songs.
7/3/16
Today we decided we would reduce the time that our first song, "Little Talks", is silent in the break down part of the song. We have made this decision because we feel that the silence is unnecessary and the audience would start to clap at the time of this silence, thinking that that we have reached the end of the song, which all of us do not want to happen. The silence normally has a duration of 16 beats however we have now reduced that to 8 beats. We feel like this is a good duration of silence without changing the song too much. After we made these decisions we rehearsed the silence numerous times before rehearsing our other two songs along with "Little Talks" with the new silence. Surprisingly this went extremely well and we thought that "Little Talks" sounded a lot better due to this minor tweak to the song.
10/3/16
Today we thought we would just continue to practice all of our songs as a set, along with the small change to "Little Talks". Ed volunteered himself to do the dialog between each song and we decided what he was going to say. Now that Ed had his lines we practiced our set as a whole over and over until the end of the lesson. All in all we feel extremely confident and the set went well.
No comments:
Post a Comment