In my hurry to load yesterday's post, when I concentrated on the video link,
I neglected to mention several topics. We played twelve songs plus an
encore, where four of the songs were in English and the rest in Hebrew. The
encore was a song that we played at
our performance1 exactly one year ago; we practiced it again maybe twice
on Wednesday evening - everyone was on the ball. When my wife heard it
advance that we were playing twelve, she thought that this was too many -
but when I asked her after the show, suddenly twelve (or thirteen) wasn't
enough.
One of the songs that we played in English was Elton John's "I guess that's
why they call it the blues"; we started playing this only about three weeks
ago, but its absorption was fast. This slightly surprised me as the song is
in 68 and we've
never played anything that wasn't in
44. I decided early on that I would play arpeggios, each quaver on its own.
This was quite painful towards the end as I had to press hard on the strings
with the fingers of my left hand (rhythm guitar requires a lighter touch)
and my right hand also had to pick three or four strings in a constant
rhythm.
This song is also much more deceptive that it seems. Not that it's
important, but it's not clear (to me, at least) in which key it is. The
verse seems to be in G whereas the chorus seems to be in C. The verse is
more subtle than it might seem: each line has four chords, G X F C, where
the second chord X varies from line to line. The first line has Em, the
second Bm, the third B7 and the fourth Am (this time around, the line
finishes on G): a good test of the memory.
To most of the band's surprise, we were joined by a guest vocalist for this
song. Literally a few minutes ago, I received a WhatsApp message answering
my query about this: 'It was spontaneous, for [the guest] had sung the song
with us several years previously". I would have linked the recording of
this, but someone - probably the guest - was singing out of tune and
slightly ruined the performance.
The evening before the performance - Wednesday - we had a long rehearsal
that started at around 7pm as I and the keyboardist tried to figure out how
we could record from the mixer - no luck. It later transpired that the cable
that we were using was plugged into the wrong sockets on the mixer; the
cable was set up so that an external source (e.g. a computer) could play
music through the mixer (i.e. it was connected to an input). On Thursday
morning, I moved the cable to different, output, sockets, and tried
connecting the 3.5mm plug on the other end of the cable to my computer's mic
socket. The computer did not recognise this connection and recorded through
the internal microphone - equivalent to the quality of recording that we
achieved with a mobile phone. I've dug out a digital voice recorder which I
bought several years ago but never used that may work - I'm going to try
that out later this morning.
After the rehearsal, I came home, showered then went to bed but I couldn't
fall asleep. My legs were hurting, possibly as a result of the fact that I
had been standing throughout the entire rehearsal, and in my mind various
songs continued to play non-stop. Eventually I did fall asleep and
fortunately I didn't have to wake up early the next day. I wonder how
professional musicians manage the decompression after a show; do they too
have songs running through their head or are they inured to this? Maybe they
decompress by drinking - or at least, they used to. Is this a private
problem of mine?
Internal links
[1] 1744
This day in history:
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 | Strumming the guitar - stage one | Programming, MIDI | |
| 246 | Books and films | Films, Nick Hornby, Time traveler's wife, Hugh Grant | |
| 699 | Researching during the Passover holiday week | DBA, Psychology | |
| 944 | Programmers in MOBI | Programming, Computer, Kindle | |
| 1023 | Donating blood (2) | Health, Donating blood | |
| 1123 | 70 years of independence | Israel, Kibbutz | |
| 1605 | Yehonatan Geffen (1947-2023) | Israel, Yehonatan Geffen | |
| 1744 | A triumphant end to a tumultuous week | DBA, Health, Priority tips, Musical group |
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