Performance of ‘Love On The Brain’ by Rihanna with me (drums), Niall (bass), Tia (guitar), Isaac and Millie (keys), and Lucy (vocals).
Overall, I think we are progressing as a group at a very fast rate. We learn and rehearsed this song, ‘Love On The brain’ by Rihanna on Monday morning, after playing ‘You Got The Love’ the Friday before, meaning we learnt both of these songs and played them both together in a group situation in about 4 days. The song is in 6/8, a very common time signature for soul and ballad love songs. It took us a little bit longer to learn this song as a group, but for me, the drums are extremely easy, so I didn’t have much of an issue with that. Like the last song, I learnt the groove ear after listening to it a few times. The hardest part of the song is remembering the structure as the bridge comes around in strange places and ends quite suddenly.
Group And Individual Strengths
As a group, we all learnt all our parts fairly quickly. In fact, we only were suggested the song about an hour before we learnt it and listened to it about twice together before going into a rehearsal together and trying to play it for the first time. We seemed to remember all our parts pretty well to say only Millie and Lucy had heard the song before; the rest of us were totally new to it, compared to the previous song where we all had heard it prior.
Generally, we are all getting along very well and seem to be enjoying playing and rehearsing with each other. This is a key part of the music industry as you will always be working with different people, perhaps even people you’ve never seen before or even people you don’t like. If you like and get along with the people you work with, it will increase your morale, self-confidence and assurance of your other band members. As we all work together so well, everybody is suggesting their own ideas and feedback to other members, whether that be how we play a part of the song, pointing out mistakes, or what songs we should learn, which is great to see so early on in the band as it shows our enthusiasm to help each other and create a great performance for next month.
Group And Individual Improvements
To make improvements to the song as a group, I feel like we need to deliver the song with more musically interesting techniques and try to make it our own. Doing this is important early on as we need to get into the habit of performing it with any creative decisions we make before the concert, and playing a song that we have worked on to incorporate our own ideas would be great to show how we have worked as a band for the final performance. We could do these things by perhaps using a rallentando at the end of the song, having the vocalists make their own harmonies in the choruses, the guitar taking more of a lead role throughout the song by performing licks or other challenging techniques.
To really improve as a band and progress our performing abilities, we need to work on the stricture of the song, particularly remembering how it goes. For this, we could write down how many bars each section is on the board, and all follow it as we play the song, or Lucy could nod at us all when we need to move to the next section. In the video, we all love track of where we are at about 2:26, as we thought it moved to the bridge but it instead stays on the verse. However, we did rectify the issue and carry on playing quickly. As well as this, we need to be able to play our parts independently without the need of a tutor to keep us in time or help with our instrument mid-song and know when we’re all going to end without having to be counted to end but the tutor.
In terms of my own improvement, I think I could work more on dynamics and making more use of different parts of the drum kit. For example, I could bring down the dynamics to about mp during the verses, bring it up to mf in the break stabs, and then up to ff for the choruses and outro. This would make the song more exciting and give the structure more character and motion. Using different parts of the drum kit could involve incorporating the low tom instead of the hi-hat during the stabs to add more low-frequency presence and power to them, or using a cross-stick technique during the verses to really emphasise the change in dynamics. This, combined with the change in dynamics, will make the drum part feel more powerful and interesting to listen to and the structure change from verse to chorus will be more noticeable, like in the original song.
Targets For Next Week
-Decide on a third song to start learning and practising.
-Keep working on ‘Love On The Brain’ as it still isn’t 100% there yet as a band.
-Make both of our songs more musically interesting y adding techniques like harmony, drum fills and guitar licks, for example.