Dan's Blog

This we completed another band meeting, one of the first were all members were present! This time around we discussed about our social media presence and also our stage outfits. We have created an event page on FaceBook, as well as twitter page. Our FaceBook event page is going to be shared with other bands at the gig so that everyone can input and co-host the event. 

We finally decided our colour scheme our clothing is going to be black and white, this is so that we can all easily match, and any lighting that is used will match our outfits.

This week we got our final choice of songs. These were Something Just Like This - Coldplay and The Chain Smokers, Castle On The Hill - Ed Sheeran, and Maybe Tomorrow - Stereophonics. However we felt that none of these songs matched our setlist at all and we asked out tutor if he could help us find another song to do. This new song is Five Colours In Her Hair by McFly and I feel it fits really well as our outro song. 

This week we received only 3 songs to choose from for our next piece... These were; Take Me To Church - Hozier, Shut up and dance - Walk the Moon and Havana - Camila Cabello. We found it really difficult to choose which song to do and finally decided upon Take Me To Church. However I originally did not enjoy the process of learning this song, as it's in a compound time signature [3/4] and this made some chord changes feel a bit strange for me. There is also a time signature change during the bridge where it goes to 4/4.

I am on guitar for this piece and had input from my peers who said it may sound cool to have a load of distortion on the chorus of the song, so i brought my Big Puff pedal in to achieve this sound. I feel this gave the song a lot of energy and made me feel better about the song.

Following our previous band meeting I created a stage plan and queried Cassie and Amber on any equipment I may have forgotten from the list. Amber pointed out that I should include and extra mic for her as she sings on one song. So I added that to the list. 

We were then given more song options to choose from, these were; Born This Way - Lady Gaga, One Day Like This - Elbow and Royals - Lorde.

We felt Born This Way was the only suitable choice for our set list and originally I played bass, however I stated to the band that I would prefer to play guitar at some point. This lead to James taking up the drums and Amber R going on bass which gave me the opportunity to play my main instrument!

In our second week, we decided which roles were going to be given to who. Me, Amber R and Cassie decide to be on the stage management / back line team. James, Lauren and Katie were given the role of Marketing and Publicity team. Finally Caitlyn and Amber O were given the role of Production Team.

As part of the Stage Management team, my responsibilities include; compiling stage plans and input lists, setting up PA and amps for rehearsal, and ensuring that sound-checks are effective and efficient.

We then decided to have some targets to achieve for the following week. As part of the Stage Management team I thought it would be a good idea for us to create a stage list, which details exactly what items we require on stage for our gig.

We also chose our second song from a choice of 5. The 5 songs to choose from were; Same Jeans - The View, Valerie - Mark Ronson, That’s Not My Name - The Ting Tings, The Fear - Lily Allen and Sweet Disposition - The Temper Trap.

However none of us liked these songs as we felt none of them fitted our setlist, so instead we decided to take a song that one of the other bands didn’t pick. 

In our first week we chose our first song and decided instrumentation for the band, our song choices were between, What You Waiting For? - Gwen Stefani, Naive - The Kooks, Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand, Smile - Lily Allen and Round Round- Sugababes.