Firstly for our own performance, we need to establish a finalized set list so that we can pick as suitable venue for the overal genre we would be playing. Eventually we came to the following set:
- Human – Rag ‘n’ Bone Man
- Master Blaster – Stevie Wonder
- Never Too Much – Luther Vandross
- If There Was Any Justice – Lamar
- Unchain My Heart – Joe Cocker
- Lost In Music – Sister Sledge
- Notorious – Duran Duran
- Love And Hate – Michael Kiwanukwa
- Cosmic Girl -Jamiroquai
- Royals – Lorde
We chose this as our set list as each track is well suited to our band setup. The singers of our group have voices well suited to these tracks, so we have backing and lead vocals for each song, guitar, bass, drums and keys as well. Each instrument plays a role in these songs, and it gives each musician a chance to show their musical ability on stage.
We picked plenty of more well known songs of various style to appeal to a wider audience. The songs were all somewhat similar in sound, mainly played clean rather than using much distorted guitar as this generally goes down well with most audiences. We also kept in mind that we would likely be performing to an audience of all ages, so we tried to avoid songs featuring any form of profanity.
The set list fit in well with the way we wanted to be portrayed by audiences, as it shows we can perform in various styles to a high standard.
This is overall a kind of Funky/Soul inspired set, and therefore we need a suitable venue to perform it in. Here are some of the realistic options that are available to us in our local area:
Kala Sangam – Ganges Hall (Theatre Space)
This potential venue I think would be an ideal space to perform our set. This us because it’s capacity isn’t over the top, holding up to 112 seatead guests, and it’s in Bradford city centre. With this being a relativly small space (with curtains drawn halfway), our sound will be crisp and clear, plus we aren’t likely to fill out more than 100 seats realistically.The banked seating allows us to be seen clearly by our audience, and could also make for a realy good video shoot should we end up having one on the night. One final plus to this venues is the already present overhead lighting rig which will allow us to light up the band with spotlights, giving our performance a bit more of an atmosphere.
The drawback to this space is the cost and booking hours;
The cost of booking this spcae is £75 per hour, with a four hour minimum booking, meaning it would cost us £300 in total.
They do offer discounts for music events like ours, however it is not stated how big this is on their offical website.
If we charged £3.00 per ticket to this event, we could potentially make out money back, the main problem is that we will not be able to fill out four hours of performance, even if we knock off an hour for the time it takes to set up and pack down.
We could perhaps look for a suitable support act to eliminate this issue, however this isn’t particularly easy.
The Underground Bradford
The Underground in Bradford could potentially be a venue available to us. The three bigget strengths of using this venue are:
- Our college has worked with them several times since it was established in 2016, therfore we can use this space free of charge whenever we need to.
- The PA and monitor rig already present at the venue is probably the best sounding in bradford at the moment, so not only will we not have to transport as much gear down, but we will have a really high quality performance sound using that rig.
- This venue has an in house sound engineer, so we would have sombody working the mixing desk for our whole set.
The only real issue with this venue is that it is more tailored to rock and pop bands rather than what we are playing, so our set may not go down as well as we’d like it to, although they are known to actively promote and put on artists of various genres.
Dye House Gallery – Bradford College
The Dye House Gallery could be an ideal space for us to perform in as it’s a part of the Lister building at Bradford College. The pro’s of this space are that we have played it a few times in the past, and we would not be charged to use it. Our chosen genre would go down as well here as it is fairly soft.
Personally I dont think it has the nicest acoustics and can be mildly ‘echoy’ when performing. Also the gallery is open to the public often and we may not be able to use it when needed. Plus this isn’t technically a set music venue, therefore it isn’t really equipped for musical events and to me would be a last resort for if we just couldnt find a suitable venue.
Practicing the set:
As the weeks went on, we were learning each song one by one and becoming more tight when playing as an ensmble. Myself and the other members practiced each track together and at home until we reached a point where we no longer needed to follow lead sheets, and could perform them comfortably with a level of professionality to each of them.
Personally, the things I had to spend most time practicing were my major lead parts, although i practiced the set all the way through at every practice to make usre that I was tight on every track.
Unchain My Heart:
I firstly worked on the track ‘Unchain My Heart’ beacuse this has a lead guitar section for the duration of the piece, and it includes a solo on top of this. The lead line during the rhythm sections was not particularly hard in note selection, but rather keeping the rhythm constant while moving between single notes as the picking style was in a funk strumming style with lost of ghost notes.
The solo to this piece required me to use a pedal to switch from clean to a distortion tone. The solo itself was based all around A minor pentatonic/blues scale, and was mainly improvised. I tried to keep the influence of the rhythm line in the solo, while also picking up the pace of the section using fast runs and moving scale positions.
Love And Hate:
This song was my personal favourite from the set list. I found the rhythm playing in this song the easiest of the set, with it maintaining a slow and steady rate of harmonic change. The solo section was what I looked forwards to in this song.
Again, the solo for this piece required me to switch to distortion. This solo section was also improvised, however I felt much less stylistically restricted due to the tempo and backing of the piece. This therfore allowed me to build up my solo (in G minor) and let loose a little bit with my guitar. I used techniques such as triplet cascades, fingertapping, and harmonics in this solo, however not to an extent where it disrupeted the feeling of the tune.
Master Blaster:
This piece was an interesting change of play style for me personally, as it has a bit of a reggae vibe about it. The rhythm section holds down a classic sort of ‘skank’ rhythm and felt mildy unuseual to play to begin with.
The tricky part with this piece is the long riff that happens after the second and last chorus. The riff is pentatonic, but is played a much fatser rate and requires your hand to do a fast slide from the 1st to the 3rd fret and back which was a difficult thing to get used to at first.
To make this even harder, the entir rhythm section of the band has to play this in tije with each other, so much of our ensemble pracitces were covering this small section until we got it nice and tight.
If There’s Any Justice:
This song technically was not that demanding, but the thing that threw myself and the rest of the band off was its structure.
I had to practice this particular song several times over during each of my practices in order to memorise the structure to a point where I was comforatble playing it without the lead sheet present.