Week Commencing 23rd February

This week was dedicated to practising as it was the last week before the performance. We decided that we should think of a setlist and go over it at least once every day in that order. Me and Chris originally had problems swapping guitars during the setlist but we found it easier after we decided we were both going to use the same guitars. Our setlist went as follows:
One Way Or Another - Blondie
A Town Called Malice - The Jam
Because The Night - Patti Smith
Girls Just Want To Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper
Walk Like An Egyptian - The Bangles
We all agreed that One Way or Another had a strong start and Walk Like An Egyptian was one of the more popular songs so we should put it at the end.
Every day we went over the setlist and any problems we had, we concentrated on those for the rest of the lesson. Usually we had enough time to go over a setlist once, pick up some faults on a few songs, go over those and do the setlist again. The main problems we faced were in A Town Called Malice. Dan couldn't get the hang of the organ part and sometimes Andy came in at the wrong time with the snare part. We continued to face problems throughout the week which sometimes we could only fix at home and wait until the lesson afterwards to practice.

Performance Evaluation

I believe on a whole, the performance went well for every band. I don't believe our band were one of the best because I think the choice of people put together meant that everyone had conflicting opinions and sometimes people didn't listen to each other. I enjoyed playing bass and although it hurt a lot of the time I'd like to carry on with that instrument maybe next time.
If I could do this project again I would have definitely tried different songs. The original setlist we'd thought of - in my opinion, was better fitted to 1 genre and better for the band as a whole. Not only, I think, would we have played those songs better, but also we would have enjoyed doing it more.
I don't think that all the decisions made within the band were fair and I think Dan especially could have had more to do within the songs. This is one of the reasons I also believe different songs should have been chosen. Although it was the band's idea to go ahead with some of the songs after we'd faced problems, one song I definitely would have chosen to change would be Girls Just Want To Have Fun, regardless of my personal taste in music, I don't think this song showed off the band's potential, especially Emily's, as she found this song hard to sing because it was too high. I think just instead of going ahead with the song, we should have tried transposing it first, it wouldn't have taken much work, as a joke the band playing in transposition for a minute or two before we started a practice one time, and we pretty much had it nailed within a few seconds, and I believe this would have been another choice we could have taken.
For the actual performance, I couldn't hear the guitar very well, and so next time I would make sure I could hear myself before I started playing something that might have been incorrect.
I found Because The Night hard because, although the chords were very easy, I don't play lead guitar and even thought it was simple, I couldn't nail the solo on the night. If I had another chance at this performance I'd practice the solo more than anything else to make sure my mind didn't go blank on the night. I know for a fact I practiced more at the things I already knew I could do rather than the things I found hard.

Week Commencing 16th February

This week we added "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. This was Emily's idea although no one really warmed to the idea. Emily found this song hard to sing because it is too high for her vocal range. She was given advice to adapt the song to her singing range although she didn't. She became frustrated and said we should change the song, but me and Chris both said that just because we'd found it a little hard at first, we shouldn't change the song. We all agreed that we should start afresh next lesson. The rest of this lesson we went through all the other songs we'd learned.
Next lesson we started again, it had been obvious that Emily had practiced this song at home and we did a lot better this time. Emily still found it hard to sing so we originally were wondering whether we should transpose the song or for Emily to just sing a different part. For the rest of us this song came fairly easily, although there was a marimba solo in it and so Chris said he'd do it on Guitar. I found the bass quite easy for this song but being the first time I'd ever played bass at all at the start of this project, I found this song in particular hurt my fretting hand every time I played it. I soon realised there was nothing I could do about this other than to practice more. This lesson went better than last time and we concentrated mostly on Girls Just Want To Have Fun for the duration, however, I then suggested we should go over One Way Or Another for the last 10 minutes or so, because that was our first song and we hadn't done it in a while.

Week Commencing 9th February

Last week we decided to add another song but start practicing this week so we had a fresh start. Emily decided on "Because The Night" by Patti Smith. This seemed to suit Emily's voice the best out of all of the songs. Because this was the first try on this song, everyone still had music sheets with them including me who had to use a chord sheet for guitar. Dan had been practicing the song at home but had found that the "original" sheet music that he'd printed out had been written wrong, so we had to leave out that part of the song to practice next time. It went well because we only needed to practice the verse and chorus. After that we had a run-through of Walk Like an Egyptian, which went better than last week, although Chris didn't have the solo sorted yet. We practiced this a few times then tried One Way or Another again, we knew we had that song played the best because it was our first one.

We practiced Because The Night and Chris helped Dan with the piano part, and this lesson seemed to go better. We ran through all of our songs this time and we started to think of an order we could put them in. We again, chose another song to leave until next week to start, this time it was Girls Just Want To Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper.

Week Commencing 2nd March

This final hour or practice we had before the performance was hard. We still faced minor problems that we were determined to fix, although some of those we knew we'd still have in the final performance. I found this practice really hard because playing bass really hurt my fretting hand more than ever this hour, and even swapping to guitar for A Town Called Malice hurt because they are mostly bar chords. We went over the setlist a couple of times, and we stopped whenever there was something we didn't like the sound of. Generally the band was excited and nervous for the performance and so I think we tried too hard on this occasion.