Progress Report
Things are still looking quite dreary for our band. Although Levi and I managed to perform 'Dreams' and 'Anna' with another group, it's still a great disappointment that I couldn't rely on my own band to learn and perform two songs in three weeks.
I understand that, from a mental and physical health perspective, it may be difficult for people to attend. I therefore do not resent anyone for their absences. Only, I feel it is unfair on me, and other dedicated people (like Sol) as we are held back by circumstances beyond our control.
Performance review: During this rehearsal, I played Dreams by Fleetwood Mac and Anna by The Beatles in coordination with Harrison (guitar/vocals), Tom (bass) and Levi (drums/vocals).
This was quite unplanned and we only came together on the day of the recording. Luckily, since we all knew our individual parts, we were quickly able to put the songs together.
Before the recording, we were able to plan each of our parts and run through both songs multiple times. We made some slight adjustments to the group dynamic, such as Levi singing the chorus of Anna, and me playing the lead guitar part while Harrison sang Anna with the basic chords.
So, what went well?
Altogether, I think what we did best was communication. We were able to divide the parts fairly and utilitarianly without any disputes.
You can see during the video we are all focusing on playing the parts, promoting a professional atmosphere. This allowed us all to stay in sync and limited the number of errors we made throughout.
In Anna, there was a section where Levi had to drum and sing at the same time. Some of the drumming was consequently uneven due to the challenging nature of the task. Despite this, we continued playing even when mistakes were made as opposed to stopping altogether.
What do we need to improve on?
I say this every time but if each person practised their individual parts until they were perfect before bringing them in, we would have gotten much further. It's normal to make mistakes during performances but I feel a lot of these were avoidable. I did occasionally blunder the lead part on Anna, which is something I could definitely have practised more.
Furthermore, I think in the future, we should have all the instruments tuned correctly as it seemed one of the guitars was out of tune.
We could also have done a level check beforehand as there were a few moments where certain instruments were too loud.
Individual Learning Plan
For the last week, I wanted to continue learning the Philip Sayce track I was learning last week. I have learned the next section, which includes a lot of fast muted strumming.
The main part of this video was quite difficult to learn due to the right-hand technique. This would have been a lot easier if the strumming had no breaks or pauses in-between, however you can see there is a pause between each three strums. Obtaining this co-ordination without tensing up took a while and a lot of discipline as I constantly wanted to speed up.
The last part of the video, as you can probably tell, is taken from Beethoven's famous 'Ode to Joy'. I saw Philip Sayce add this into his performance live, perhaps as an Easter egg of sorts, and I thought it was very unusual yet honourable for a psychedelic blues rock artist to be paying tributes to a classical composer. Therefore, I decided to learn it (making it fit in the key of the song). I have experimented with fast strumming like this before, however, I typically cannot keep time very well while doing so and tend to go too fast. By playing slowly with a metronome and speeding it up, I managed to get this passage a lot cleaner and more even.
> For full transparency, this post was completed and the video was uploaded on the 15th of December. The video is a previous recording from this week - however, this post has been written to reflect my feelings at the time.
I apologise for not having written this earlier, however, please understand I have been experiencing mental health struggles which take priority in my life.
Please accept this post for the initiative I have taken in completing my undone work.
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