Song Choices
Firstly we chose The Chain by Fleetwood Mac as our tutor suggested that we should do this song due to it including good harmonies and arrangements. This meant that it would work with our band due to including 4 singers, a pianist and guitarist. Since this is such a unique arrangement we believed that creating interesting harmonies would sound effective and work with the song choices. Once we worked on the harmonies and further developed the song, this became one of our best songs from our set list, therefore we placed it first.
Secondly we chose Don’t let go by En Vogue as again, our tutor suggested that this would be a good song, as it has a lot of harmony arrangements. The tutor decided that I should take lead on arranging this song. So the first thing I decided that we should do is work out the harmonies in the song, as well as learn the piano and guitar parts at home. This worked effectively as then when we came together as a band during rehearsals, we were able to know exactly what we were doing. Then after we learnt the basic parts I decided that we should add a vocal introduction to the song, so each singer would come in one by one and build the harmonies up until we all sang the lyric ‘don’t let go.’ We believe that this was a good song to do and should be in our set list because it again worked incredibly well with the harmonies.
We then chose the Work Song by Nina Simone, this jazz piece was suggested by our tutor as it let us have our individual parts during the verses. Unlike this rest of our set list, this let us have solo verses, whilst the guitarist and I accompanied the three vocalists. I believe that this song stood out from our set list, so in some ways it worked with the set list as it presented a different aspect of our band, but in other ways it also didn’t work as it was a completely different genre and style to the rest of the set list.
The next song we chose was my original song, City of Street Lights. The tutor suggested that I should include an original since I write my own material. Therefore I went through my original material and thought that this would be the best option to go with. I then played it to the band and they agreed that we should work on this song. Therefore the tutor helped me recognise the chords so that the guitarist could also play it. From there I assigned both solo roles within the vocalist and unison parts. I split the choruses and verses up to suit the vocalist’s best. We then added an improvisation section towards the end, which made it more unique. I believe that this song worked within our set list because it had a similar style to the rest of the set list, however it was also its own piece which gave the set list a distinctive sound.
The next song we chose was a hard song to choose due to struggling to find repertoire, however Too Good at Goodbyes by Sam Smith worked well with our set list. One of the vocalists suggested this song, so after learning it we decided that it would work. We chose the various singers to have both solo parts and harmonies within the song. This worked well with the accompaniment and the rest of the set list as it was a well-known song. This was also a good song to highlight the strength of the vocals as the arrangement allowed the vocalists to be unique and sing within their style, rather than going off of the original.
The next song we chose was Sweet Child of Mine by Guns and Roses. We chose this song as the guitarist already knew the chords so he taught me them and it worked well. As soon as we added vocals we knew that it would be ideal to include in our set list and it was. This was a fairly easy song to do, however we arranged it differently to the original to make it unique and also due to having 4 vocalists we thought that to rearrange it, it would suit our arrangement better too. We placed this song last as it closed our set list fairly well as it is quite a powerful piece.
Overall our set list was fairly successful due to most songs in our set list being in a similar type of genre, pop/rock. I also believe that our set list was ideal for our target audience, since it was aimed at young adults/teens we thought that including pop hits now (Too Good at Goodbyes) and general well known songs such as: Don’t Let Go and Sweet Child of Mine it meant that it could connect with the audience.
However throughout choosing the songs we should do, we came across several songs which didn’t seem to work/fit into the set list or our arrangement.
These songs were:
These two songs became difficult to fit into our set list as when we learnt the lyrics, chords and arrangement of each song it seemed to not work when we all tried to rehearse together. In addition to this we didn’t want to spend too long on a song that wasn’t going to sound effective since we only had 4 weeks to rehearse. Therefore to solve this problem, we eliminated them and didn’t practice them after discussing our repertoire.
As well as the rehearsals throughout the weeks upcoming to the performance we also had recorded meetings including The Cassettes and our tutor, Nic. These meetings detailed what which should do within the commencing weeks to ensure that the Charity Gig was fully organised.
This is the footage of the meetings that we had with our Tutor:
This is the footage of all the rehearsals we had throughout preparing for the 4 weeks: