A month ago, I wrote that for the first time in history (excluding the Covid years), the kibbutz will not be holding a communal seder; instead, there will be some form of ceremony a few days beforehand and that the musical group will be playing. We've been under a strict regime of two rehearsals a week and we will have two more before we play.
As I
wrote
in December,
After a while of rehearsing, there comes a time when one can play the songs
freely, without worrying what the next chord is or whether if one is in
tune. Then playing the songs becomes a pleasure and one wants more. I think
that we reached this stage last Saturday night, so our rehearsal on
Wednesday evening was more fun that usual.
Once again we've reached that stage, which is just as well. We played the
entire set the other night with barely a breakdown.
The problem with the group is that it's a kibbutz group and so we're all equal. There's no musical director; instead, basic arrangements are agreed upon and one can't really criticise anyone's playing. That said, the weakest link is the pianist, who unfortunately plays most of the time like a pianist and not as a modern keyboard player. He comes from a long tradition of musicians who read music and it's hard for him to improvise or even loosen up.
Eventually we taught him how to play the reggae rhythm that is needed on two songs: a quaver on beat two, another on the 'and' of beat two and a further quaver on beat four. As someone pointed out, he was playing exactly the same thing as I was. Indeed. So I went home, thought a bit then started playing those songs in a different style with syncopated arpeggios. Sometimes I mess up the timing slightly, but it doesn't matter as it adds variety.
At the moment, we're playing 12 or 13 songs. We started off with four songs from the swimming pool performance, added a few more here and there ... and suddenly we were adding a new song every week (we've stopped now). For most of the songs, the general attitude seems to be as one of The Band told of their days as the Hawks: STOMP! But there are the two reggae songs that break up the flow and there's another song that starts out fairly delicately before descending into the usual stomp. One of the new songs starts out with a tinkling piano intro and slowly builds and builds. I thought that this would be a good closing number but the others thought otherwise.
The song that we are closing with is accompanied solely by the two guitars: no bass, no drums and no piano. Although the record is in G, for some reason the singers wanted to lower the key by a semitone, so now we're playing in F#. The two guitarists took different options to make playing this song easier. I'm using my octave pedal as a transposition pedal, playing the song as if it were in D and having the pedal transpose it up by four semitones. The other guitarist brought along a second guitar to our last rehearsal, where the guitar is tuned down by a semitone. As a result, almost automatically the two guitars are playing different chord shapes. I listened to a recording of the song from one evening: I should stick to playing chords on 1 and 3, instead of imagining that I'm playing fingerstyle on an acoustic guitar - this way there'll be a firmer rhythm.
Funnily enough, there's another song (the new reggae song) that is written in
G but we're playing it (as per the
video) in G#. Here we don't need any tricks to play in this odd key; it's
interesting that we can go up a semitone without too much bother but
not go down a semitone. As I wrote above, I'm playing arpeggios on the
top three strings so this is easier than full barre chords.
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