LO3 - Being Able To Develop As A Musical Ensemble

Rehearsal: ways of rehearsing eg personal practice, group rehearsal, sectional; use of equipment; methods

eg use of tempo, use of click track, playing along to pre-recorded music, acapella, use of structure, use of

improvisation

Reflection: eg watching videos of performances, band meetings, practice diaries, rehearsal logs, peer

feedback, audience feedback

Rehearsal

The Monarchs
One Step Closer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXb0vkfwsc0

In the link about there is a video of one of my old bands practicing for an up and coming gig at the Henley Youth Festival. Recorded a rehearsal of us playing One Step Closer so we can watch it back and listen to what we need to improve on and any changes we can make to any of the parts. When listening to the video you can see how we need practice linking the chorus into the third verse.

This video also really helped me out with what I was going to play in my guitar part because I was still working out what I should play in the song. When playing this song whilst recording I was just jamming around different ideas to see what would fit the song best. Luckily I managed to piece a couple licks. This was also a good reference to help me remember the licks I played.

Can You See Me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2pMR3fBmDM

Again in the link above we decided to record a rehearsal of one of our songs  to prepare ourselves for an up and coming gig at the Henley Youth Festival. In this rehearsal you can see how we needed to improve on various different things, such as the structure/texture (when each person should come in at which time), the lyrics needed to be revised more because Mo forgot some of the first verse, and we needed to work on our levels and main mix over all as a band because the lead guitar and bass couldn't really be heard very well compared to the vocals, drums and rhythm guitar.

 
This video helped me to remember what I should in the guitar solo parts of the song. The majority of this song for me was quite improvised other than the choruses and I needed a reference to help me remember what I should play for future performance. This video really helped me to pick out different guitar parts that I wanted to include in my actual version of the song.

Emma Charlotte
Black Horse and the Cherry Tree
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDkOccNTTyM

In this link is a video of Me and Will playing as session musicians for the new up and coming solo artist Emma Charlotte who was competing in a singing competition.
This video was made to help us time how long we took playing through the song so we could work out a correct tempo. This video also helped us work out how we could make the vocal part more interesting.
Making this video helped us realise that we were playing the song too slow and in order to get it to fit into Emma's time slot in the competition we needed to speed the song up. This also helped to make the performance more lively for the audience to watch.

Reverie
Lines
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wheykw3ZsGE

In the link above is a video of one of the many practices we did of a Lucy Rose song called Lines. The reason behind this video was so we could monitor how much more we need learn to make the song sound like the original. Despite lacking a bassist and a full scale acoustic drum kit we still managed to pull off a fairly substantial performance of the song. This song is particularly hard because the constant time signature changes and the tempo changes towards the end in the choruses. When listening back to this rehearsal we as a band noticed that it is vital that all of our instruments are perfectly in tune with each other due to the vast amount of octaves that we play throughout the song.

Reflection

In order to get a decent amount of feedback before we play big gigs, the bands I've been in usually play small warm up gigs to see what the crowds reaction would be like to our material. It is also good to get a chance to see what it would be like to perform the songs on the actual night.

Lines (Warm Up Gig)

Here is a photo of Reverie playing at Gig Night in
preparation for the Henley Youth Festival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7RriDTczvI

In this video Reverie played a last minute gig at Gig Night in preparation for the more popular gig at the Kenton Theatre for the Henley Youth Festival.
This performance helped us to determine how much more practice we needed of the song, what the crowd thought of the song, what we could improve on before the bigger gig and how it would feel performing this song to an audience.

One of my old bands called The Monarchs made a habit out of recording rehearsal logs in order to remember certain parts to knew songs or new ideas that we each came up with in the band. This especially came in handy for when we started to write new material in preparation for up and coming gigs.
The Stop Idea Rehearsal (later became One Step Closer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE96D6ouSGk

This video demonstrates us putting an idea into action and discussing various different ways we could improve on this new idea. Eventually this idea became the pre-chorus to one of our original songs One Step Closer (as seen in previous links).