Now, because we were an acoustic act, we needed to choose songs carefully as the songs would need to be arranged for a solo acoustic guitar with piano backing.
Here is our set list:
- The Chain – Fleetwood Mac
- Don’t Let Go – En Vogue
- Work Song -Oscar Brown Jr.
- City Of Streetlights – Sarah’s Original
- Too Good at Goodbyes – Sam Smith
- Sweet Child o’ Mine – Guns n’ Roses
The Chain – We chose this song as it is primarily acoustic guitar; It leant itself to our band layout. Not only that, but it is a hugely well known song as it has been covered countless times, most recently by Harry Styles, and it is also used as the opening theme for Formula 1 racing events.
Don’t Let Go – We picked this song as it has been remixed by several artists recntly and is currently hugrly popular. It was quiate a generic pop song really, but it had a really nice feel to the piece and is also incredibly catchy. It suited the guitar well as it is only a three chord song, this meant I could play around with it and add percussive parts, dynamics, and arpeggios to really give the song some colour.
Work Song – This song was chosen for us to play by one of th ecollegr tutors. This was nice and easy to arrange as it mainly consists of vocal parts with a single chord backing for the verses. We added a key change to this piece so that it modulated up by a semitone after the second chorus to liven the piece up a bit.
City of Streetlights – We picked this song mainly because it was original material writen by Sarah. This was the most work to get right as it mean that we were writing parts to it from scratch but we managed to pull it off really well instrumentally. I played the main riff while the keys built up behind it, and then added harmonies where I felt it worked well. We added a build up section that was mainly improvisational which worked out really well. It is a really repetitive and catchy song so it isn’t hard to remember, therfore it left a really good impression on the audiance.
Too Good at Goodbyes – This song was a good choice as it is hugely popular at the moment, and it’s a simple four chord piece. For this song we had the piano carry it allong and I mainly used the guitar to add in percussion parts while only really playing during the choruses. It ended up working fantastically well and fit into the set perfectly.
Sweet Child o’ Mine – We chose this song to end on as it’s probably the most popular song on the set list, and everyone in the band already knew it. we rearranged it into our own structur to suit the acoustic set up that we had. It was fairly basic with a small acoustic guitar solo that worked really well and I thouht that it really ended the set with a bang.