In my eyes, we had a very successful band practice last night. At the moment, we're meeting only once every two weeks, until we have a date for our next perfomance. The last few days have been very cold (for us): I picked up the Stagg a few days ago to practice a little, but the strings hurt my fingers so I stopped. The practice room was at a reasonable temperature but even so I had a little finger pain. I digress. I changed the position of my amplifier so that its loudspeaker was pointed away from me: this small change made it much easier for me to hear what I was playing, and for a change I didn't feel drowned out by the other guitarist. I also achieved a good tone that I could change via the pickups and tone control on the guitar.
We started off by working on a new song; the documented chord charts has the song in G, so this is what we began with. I and the other guitarist noodled for a bit on the opening section (we decided to call this the chorus), and it was decided that we would start with an instrumental chorus before the singing started. For a change, it's me who's playing most of the single notes: I had an idea for one fill between chords and somehow this led to me playing the lead guitar part. That said, the second half of the chorus needs to be worked out a bit better.
We then played the whole song through, complete with vocals. It was then decided to lower the key to F: this actually is the key played in the video. It's a shame, though, as G is a good key for guitar with plenty of open strngs (and a nice Cadd9 chord shape) whereas F calls for more barre chords and doesn't allow the strings to ring so much. Despite this change, we managed to play the song without problem (sometimes transposing leads to someone making a mistake with the transposition). In the video, one guitarist is playing with a capo on the third fret, meaning that he is effectively playing in D. This might be worth checking out, although I shall have to transpose the chords before I start.
I should add that I also contributed the coda for the song: we first play the opening line of the chorus (in G, G D Em Em7) then play C Cm G - a very Beatle-ish ending. Everyone thought that this was an excellent idea. Am I chanelling David Bennett? He made a video (that I can't find at the moment) discussing the IV iv I progression/cadence. He also made a video about 27 tips for a professional musician; one was for keyboard players that said "don't use the transpose key"... see later on.
Once we got this song out of the way, we then ran through three songs from our first performance so that we could both dust them off and also introduce them to the keyboard player. He tries hard and often plays some nice parts (when I can hear them), but he's a bit slow on picking up the songs and chord changes. At one point, he was playing the opening chords to a song that sounded a bit off; I looked at his fingers (he sits next to me) and they seemed to be playing the correct chords - which is when I realised that he had left the transpose key on and was playing a semitone lower than everyone else! See the previous paragraph. Another amusing incident involving him last night had him waving a chord chart at me; I nodded and said "yes", meaning that the chords were for the current song. Afterwards it turned out that he had asked me whether what we were playing in was the same key as written (it wasn't: the chart was in C and we were playing in D) - this caused a few laughs.
We finished off with another fun tune whose opening is the same as the Spencer Davis' group hit from the mid-60s, "I'm a man". Of course, no one else picked up on the reference.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 443 | More City Boy | City Boy | |
| 534 | Election day duty driver | Kibbutz, Probability | |
| 669 | Commuting | Personal | |
| 915 | MP3 Headphones | Richard Thompson, MP3 | |
| 916 | Alan Rickman, RIP | Films, Obituary | |
| 1574 | Inside and outside the lemon tree | Personal |
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