Music Blog LMA

This week, we received a new song again. We have chosen to do ‘Take Me To Church’ by Hozier. At first we were really skeptical about doing this song and we weren’t sure as it doesn’t really fit with the rest of our set, however, we agreed we need a slower song in the set to pace the performance and have peaks and troughs. For this I have decided to play piano as it is a very dominant instrument in this piece. We have worked very hard on getting this piece together as at first it sounded very simple and it was a very limp performance. We have made adjustments to ensure that the song will work, for example when the guitar kicks in, we have added loads of distortion and Dan is using a big muff pedal to give it extra drive and boost. We added lots of backing vocals such as ‘oohs’ and loads of harmonies to fill up the texture and we worked a lot on dynamics. This song still needs a lot of work and our target for this week is to focus on this song and get it up to scratch with the other songs. It is my personal target to go home and practice the chords and learn the lyrics for my verse. So far though we have got the structure and all the chords together and the skeletal version sounds good now that Dan has the extra boost on his guitar. Something else we worked on was the time signature change from the verses to chorus.

For our band meeting this week we have designed the band logo and added it to the Instagram page and posted a few posts advertising the gig on our social medias. This is part of the marketing and publicity team in our band but we are all involving ourselves in it to try and get loads of people to attend the gig. Finally, we all sent in our costume ideas and selected what we were all going to wear. Our target for next week is to rehearse and refine all 3 songs as a set and make them flow nicely. We need to play and sing with more conviction.

In this weeks band meeting we discussed band names and also costume ideas. We have came up with a band name and also created an Instagram page to promote the gig. We have named our band ‘Disciples Of The Pilgrim’ and we have agreed that our costumes for the gig will be themed as 90′s punk. For our targets this week we need to come up with a logo and do some promotion on the social media page.

Follow our college band Instagram page for updates on our gig.

This week in college, we have carried on rehearsing our first song ‘Take Me Out’ by Franz Ferdinand, we have continued working on the tempo and I in particular have worked on the drum fills and the hi-hat groove. The song has improved leaps and bounds already all we need to do is perfect it and tighten up the structure and the stabs and make them clean. This week we have also received a new song. We have chosen to do ‘Womaniser’ by Britney Spears because we feel it fits well with our band set up and also we can rock it up and it goes well with our first choice. We have began again mapping out the structure and learning the chords and sections together as a band. I am playing kit again for this song so I have been working on adding dynamical changes, for example the first 2 verses I am playing with the hi-hat closed and the 3rd verse I am going to my floor toms to bring it down in dynamics. However, on the chorus I am using my Crash cymbal and also the hi-hat wide open. Another thing I have worked on individually is to not speed up the tempo too much as the singers are running out of breath for the chorus’ so we have taken it down in tempo a little. Our targets for the week are to fix our intros and outros and make them really clean and polished. We also had a band meeting this week in which we discussed our stage layout and also what inputs we need. We are going to need 2 guitars, 1 bass guitar, 1 keyboard, drum kit, 5 mins and mic stands and a keyboard stand. Finally, this week something we have worked well with has been the harmonies, we have added a lot into Womaniser and they work really well.

This week we received our first song to learn which was ‘Take Me Out’ by Franz Ferdinand. We chose this song because it fits our set-up as a band well and we all like the genre and want to get the audience participating with this song. We began by mapping out the structure and learning the chords by ear. At first we struggled as a band with the slow down at the beginning and the tempo but we have worked on being more cohesive as a band. I am playing drums for this song and I have asked Dan, James and Lauren (the guitarists and bass player) to watch me and keep with my kick pedal for the slow down and now we are starting to bring it together. We are now working on securing the tightness and the flow of the song and also remembering the structure. I led the band through the rehearsal and organised who was singing which part. We also worked a lot on harmonies and at first one of the harmonies sounded really dissonant so we broke it up bit by bit to see what was wrong and we tweaked and fixed it. Nick taught me the correct drum fill so now I am working on improving my ‘flams’ to improve my individual performance. I also at home have been working on timing and the groove on the hi-hat. We organised the different roles of the band and I am part of the stage management and backline team which consists of me organising where we all need to be on stage for the performance and also what we need such as mics, DI boxes, monitors, amps, mic stands etc... I have to ensure that soundcheck runs smoothly and that we go in prepared with a list for the sound guy of what we need, what song we will soundcheck and also if we want any effects on the vocals, for example delay or reverb.