- there are three or four songs in 3/4 time
- there are a few 'acoustic' songs that might actually be played with one acoustic guitar
- there are one or two songs during which I don't play
- I get to sing lead vocal on one song
The 'not playing' bit is because at least one of the songs is very delicate and I feel that I don't have anything to add to it (and I don't want to make it sound worse). For another song, I feel a bit like George Harrison in a very cringe-inducing scene from the "Let It Be" film when he says to Paul McCartney something like "I'll play what you want me to play, and I won't play at all if you don't want me to".
Referencing the Beatles is obviously subconscious, for the song that I am going to sing is "I saw her standing there", the opening song of the first Beatles' album. We've rehearsed this a few times, but at our last rehearsal, whilst probably waiting for someone to get themselves together, I started playing it at a very slow place, turning the song into something else. We continued to play the entire song in this new arrangement, and at the end, I turned to the others and said "Well? Maybe we could play the song like that - it will certainly sound unusual". In the end we agreed that the first verse will be slow and the rest fast, although I have yet to decide whether to repeat the first verse at the fast tempo and simply to continue with the second verse.
I now have memorised almost all of the songs (or more accurately, the songs have wormed their way into my memory), but there's one where I am going to play with the music on a stand - this has an instrumental, or more correctly, vocalese break of something like 24 bars, and the chords for this create a continually rising spiral with several diminished chords. It's not something that is easily memorised, hence the sheet music. In fact, it took several weeks to figure out the complete and correct sequence: although I have the official sheet music for this song in a book published some 45 years ago, the chords there are in a different key and use different symbols for diminished and half-dimished chords. Not only that, I remember that I played it at a wedding about 40 years ago and then I transposed the chords to a yet another key that is not the same key in which we will be playing. So I had to figure it all out again, by comparing the various chord charts and what I heard.
I must admit that I am less enthusiastic about this set of songs that I was for our previous set. The performance will take place again at the kibbutz pub; my wife insists that I should be in the front row of musicians instead of lurking at the back. Obviously for 'my song', I'll be at the front but I don't know about the rest.
The octave pedal2 made its debut appearance. At first I was worried that it seemed to make a great deal of noise when I wasn't playing, but this wasn't noticeable during the two songs in which I used it. There is a third song that is in Cm that also requires the pedal; this is quite a delicate song and I am worried that there may be too much noise. We didn't play this song at our last rehearsal so I don't know what it will be like. At the worst, I can use a capo.
Internal links
[1] 1923
[2] 1967
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 388 | Red Cap | TV series, Switzerland | |
| 1247 | Smart watch? I call it 'stupid watch' | Mobile phone | |
| 1328 | Peter Green, RIP | Obituary, Fleetwood Mac |
No comments:
Post a Comment