Ensemble 14

Yesterday night we played at prize evening and in todays music lesson we had to write an evaluation of our three performances as a group. Overall I think the three songs we decided to play and perform went very well and all the problems we had were easily resolved within a week or two.

Everyone in the group enjoyed themselves and what they played. My personal highlight whilst learning these songs was getting to play bass as I had only ever played guitar before and it felt good to take a step away from the lead guitar limelight and focus on gelling well with tom on drums to form a good rhythm section.

Ensemble 13

Next week we are playing in prize evening and we are going to perform all three of our songs and try to play them perfectly so we can get a high mark on them. In the lesson yesterday, we played the song properly for the first time without making any mistakes. The dynamics were great and everyone kept in time. Where it didn’t take us that long to learn this song, we all are feeling confident playing this song next week in front of an audience for the first time.

Over the course of this week we will have to practice all three songs and get used to playing all three songs one after another. We will do this by just practicing in our lesson time because we all feel confident enough to not have to practice any of the songs after school. Dom will carry on playing the acoustic guitar intro in his own time to just keep that fresh in his head for the performance next Thursday.

Ensemble 12

Today we played the song as a group for the first time. Over this week I have learned the bass guitar parts and I enjoyed doing this.

Jaina had learned the melody on the song but on piano. She will play this a higher octave than the guitars so it doesn’t sound too mushy. George had learnt the staccato piano part heard throughout the song. It’s the little stabs on guitar that is on the off beats of the song which he has learned on the piano. 

We decoded that when we play the chorus we all come in with the same chords but over two different octaves. This makes it sound more full.

Over this week will we carry on practice the song in our lesson times because there is nothing that we need to go and learn separately for this song. However, Dom has decided that he wants to do the intro of the song on an acoustic 12 string guitar like the original. He will go home and practice this because he already knows it but he keeps going out of time. He will achieve this by using a metronome on his phone to get up to tempo and practice on the fingering of the intro because it is quite complicated. He is doing this because he doesn’t want to go out of time in a live performance so he is going to practice this as much as he can within a week.

Ensemble 11

The new song we have chosen is Hotel California by The Eagles. This was Dom’s choice as the bottle landed on him. I again agreed to play bass an Sam and Dom already knew the whole song on guitar. This meant that me George and Jaina and to learn our parts quickly. Our first problem was again that there was no piano in the original song. However, there are lots of guitar layers in this song so George and Jaina should be able to play these parts on the Piano.

This has seemed to become a regular problem with the songs we chose however this will help them as musicians as it means they are learning to adapt their styles to different genres of music that don't typical involve pianos.

George and Jaina will learn parts for next lesson and I will learn the bass guitar part. I am looking forward to this as the bass part is played on a syncopated off beat so I am looking forward to the challenging of learning this.

Ensemble 10

We came up with a ending for superstition in todays lesson. We decided to follow the lead vocal line and on our instruments play the notes of line tyler was singing, "very superstitious."
This worked very well as it gave the song a twist and made our version sound more unique.
We sat down and worked out the melody and once we had it down we practised it as a band. Tom played crash accents on each notes and this gave the ending a punch to it.

Ensemble 9

Whilst playing in todays lesson after having made the changes the song sounded really good however we had problems with the chorus of th song. This was mainly due to everyone playing slightly different chords. To overcome this Tom sat down and learn the original chords and taught them to George, Jaina, Sam and Dom. These were jazzy chords with awkward finger positions. Once they had learnt these parts we practised just the chorus and it sounded much better with less dissonance.

I didn't have to learn these chords I was just playing the root note of the chords as a single note on the bass guitar.

Ensemble 8

This week we played Superstition together for the first time.

There was only one problem and it was the beginning of the song. The first problem we had was the timing of when George came in in the keys .Tom starts the song on the drums and George has to enter 4 bars in but on the 3rd beat of bar 3. At first he found this complicated because he was so used to entering at the beginning of a bar but with practise this was completed within 10-15 minutes. He found that a ‘clav’ voicing on the piano through logic got the right sound for the song.

George and Jaina had our same problem with the two pianos clashing parts but they managed to find a way to overcome this by writing different parts.  It was my turn to play bass for this song. I had learnt my parts at home so I knew what I was playing so I didn't really have to mess around with my part when we started playing it together. Sam played the original guitar part and when dom played this as well it made the guitars to dominate in the song. To over come this Dom played some jazz guitar chords underneath the main guitar riff.