Solo Performance:
For this set I chose to do three songs that were covers but I did personalised versions of those songs to fit my style of music and allow to experiment with new things.
I’m your’s – Jason Mraz:
This song is quite easy to play with only four chords that repeat through out the whole song in the same order. A maj, Em, F sharp and D. when I was practising this song I realised that this chord progression also fits with another song called Hey there Delilah by the Plain White Ts so I ended up making it a mash up of the two songs since the mood is the same in both songs and it gave me a chance to play around with the harmonies of the songs as well.
Just the two of us – Bill Withers :
‘just the two of us’ has always been a favourite of mine to perform and it’s a fairly easy song with a couple of advanced chords. The song has 6 chords and the rhythm of the song allows you to be creative with it for example in the very first bar of the song I play all 6 chords and as the song progresses I am able to improvise by leaving a chord out or playing an extra one including the 6 if I play the last three in one bar. I chose to make this song a mash up with a a very well known hip hop song by Ice Cube called ‘it was a good day. I was trying to different things with the song when I realised that those 2 songs share the same time signature which made it really easy for me to combine the two.
Heart attack – Dave :
This song is also one of my all time favourites and mainly because it’s very relatable for me. This song has a lot of emotion in it and a deeper message which is why I chose to perform the song at the end of my set. the original song doesn’t have the chord progression I used in the video. The chord progression that I use is from one of my original songs which was inspired by this song but it’s not completed yet so I decided to use my own chord progression and used the lyrics Dave wrote. Once again I was trying to experiment with the song I wrote and realised that the rhythm and the time signature of both songs is quite similar so I played around with my rapping flow until I found the right one and put it all together at the end.
Reflection:
The good thing for me about this performance was that I actually enjoyed, I was nervous before the set because I hadn’t performed in a while so I was scared to make mistakes. I really liked the equipment and the staff the management provided, The sound quality was something that I really liked . For me the fact that I made only 1 mistake lyrically in the last song was really good, even though I failed to hit a couple notes in the first two songs but I know why that happened so I’m not worried about that too much.
When it comes to improvement there’s always space for it, In my set I would have liked to practice it a lot more than I did. I also should’ve prepared a proper introduction of myself and the songs instead of just improvising it. My approach towards the project could’ve been a lot more professional.
Given the last song had a lot of curse words in it, I was aware of that fact and thats why I made a decision to perform this song because you had to be over 18 to be in the venue so everyone was over the legal age I’m aware the crowd might have found somethings offensive but that song is a reality of life even though some lyrics were harsh they come from a real place.
Ensemble Performance:
I didn’t pick any of these songs are apart from only the last song, I was hearing these songs for the first time, none of them were appealing to me so I decided to be a professional about it and be a part of the band and do my job as best as I could.
There were a lot of things that didn’t go according to our plan but I feel like we adapted well to the challenges we faced. In the first song none of the guitars were on and the drummer had started drumming, the fact he didn’t stop and we recovered from the set back was quite impressive to me, all though most of us had been in for practice there was a lack of commitment that I personally noticed in the band which was quite obvious on show day but there’s nothing one person or two can really do about it so i just focused on my part.
One of the things that went well for me was that in the last song I had a solo part which went really smoothly apart from me playing literally just one wrong note, given I hadn’t performed a solo live on stage before, this was something I looked into and practiced and figured out the most comfortable way to move around the pentatonic scale that John told me.