Week 1:
During the first week we were split into two bands, and although to begin with, we had no band names, we grouped together to have a band meeting to start thinking about our set list. Our first ideas consisted of Fluorescent Adolescent by the Arctic Monkeys, Thunder by Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, Bring Me To Life by Evanescence and All Star by Smash Mouth, we chose these songs either because of their popularity and connection with the audience, or because members of our band already felt confident performing them, like with Thunder. However, out of all of these songs, the only song we continued to perform was Bring Me To Life, as the rest of the songs contained inappropriate themes or swearing. So for the rest of the week we began to learn Thunder and Bring Me Back To Life, we also, with help from our course tutor Nick, began to play around with the pieces to make space in the music for our lack of a drummer and gave the songs a more acoustic feel, though by the end of the week we had also had to decline thunder due to its inappropriate themes and swearing. One of the issues we were having during the first week, as I found out from one of our singers Leah, was that our band was having communication issues, so we grouped together and had another band meeting to discuss this and how we could resolve it, in the end we decided that we could use a combination of different techniques to improve our rehearsals with better communication. We decided to say that, if we were having issues with a certain part of a song, we could speak about it with the rest of the band to make the issue clearer to see and easier to resolve, also, we decided to have the safety word of Banana incase we were getting too loud or drifting away from the rehearsal so we could get back into rehearsing effectively. Nick helped me, and the other instrumentalists, find the right parts to play as we were finding it quite difficult to find good acoustic parts that sounded good together, once we had our parts to learn, we learnt our individual parts and worked together to learn when and where each member of the band should come in, and we also worked together to change the layouts of the songs until they suited our bands collective playing style.
Week 2:
During the second week, we decided to choose some more songs to practise and learn for the gig, and so we chose to use Leah Collins’ original song Wish You Were Here, also we decided to use Tom Petty’s Free Falling as a tribute to Tom Petty as he had sadly passed away quite recently, we also decided to play Use Somebody by the Kings of Leon, because its a very popular song and was quite easy to learn and put our own twist on, and Zombie by the Cranberries, because it conveys a message, that seemed very fitting with all the issues we were having with ISIS and terrorism, about the IRA and terrorism. We later decided that these would be great songs to open and close our set with as they are well known songs that we were confident performing and would allow us to give our set a strong opening and a strong closure. During our rehearsals, our whole band focused mostly on the harmonic factors of our songs, especially with vocals as Nick was helping the singers find good harmonies for each song. This gave the instrumentalists time to get used to playing well together, playing in sync, and allowed us to find our style as a band more and feel more confident with it. Being more confident with our style as a band allowed us to begin to incorporate it into our music more and feel more confident in the changes we were making to the songs to personalise them and make them fit for acoustic performance. Most of these changes were making space in the music to show off more harmony and melody than we were originally able to do.
week 3:
Week 3 was mostly finalising and polishing off each song for performing, which meant perfecting dynamics, harmonies, and melodies. Throughout the entirety of week 3 Leah Mellor, one of our singers, had a throat infection, which slowed down the rehearsal process a lot as she had the most powerful voice and we were working on our dynamics mostly, this meant that we had to work around the issue by practising our own pieces and perfecting the dynamics as a band without Leah, after Leah was confident that she could sing well enough, we began to work on her dynamics afterwards. Perfecting our dynamics as a band allowed us to find the best level for each instrument, and how hard we should play throughout our different parts to make the songs sound as good as possible. Week 3 was definitely our weakest week of rehearsals as we felt like we were all heavily dependant on Leahs singing to play well as she was a key part of the dynamical aspects of our songs.
Week 4:
Week 4 consisted mostly of practising our entire performance from start till end in the Henry Mitchell Hall, our venue for the gig, and running mock performances to make sure that we were ready, not just as a band but as a full crew for the gig, by running sound checks, ensuring that all of the equipment worked, etcetera. This week allowed us to be ready as performers to play through the whole gig smoothly, we werent focusing on our pieces, but more on the transitions in between them, whilst still making sure our pieces were polished and ready to go for the gig.