Performance of ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ by Artcic Monkeys, with me (guitar), Lucy (vocals and Ellis (keys).
Overall, I think we have made a lot more progress with each other as a group and also on our own individual parts. After spending time together last week, we have started to gel more as a band and we get along very well. We have similar music tastes too, which is always helpful to minimise creative differences for playing styles or songs we want to try. We managed to learn this next song probably in about 30 minutes, it was then just a case of playing it over and over as a group until we had it to a good standard. Learning songs quickly is great as we can then focus on other, just as important aspects of our performance.
Group And Individual Strengths
As we had all heard the song already, learning this together both as a group and individually was fairly easy. I and Ellis learnt the chords and melodies by ear, and as you can see in the video, none of us used chord sheets or a tab. Lucy knew the lyrics, however, had them up on her phone for support in case she slipped up. It didn’t take us long to complete the first full run-through of the song and by the end of the day, we had the song almost perfect and was ready to perform it to the class.
Similar to last week, we used dynamics to our advantage. This is helpful to make different sections more powerful than others, which we did here. For the second verse, Ellis completely dropped out, and I played a lot quieter compared to the rest of the song where I am striking all of the strings with force. Lucy used a softer, fainter tone of voice. I think this has a huge effect on the final chorus as it makes it seem more noticeable and louder than the rest of the song.
As I learnt the song solely by ear, it gave me some ways to experiment with voicings and use different chord shapes instead of the usual major and minor chords. So, used open chords up the fretboard to make the song hold a different feel compared to power or barre chords, which can be fairly restricting sometimes if you are wanting a softer or more interesting chord progression. I have always been a fan of using open chords along the fretboard as it opens a whole new world of playing and tends to make the chords easier to play, so you can begin to experiment with other things such as strumming patterns or fingerpicking styles.
Group And Individual Improvements
During the performance, we tended to laugh a bit, which we need to work on as we are leading up to a professional performance. Because the lead singer of Arctic Monkeys, Alex Turner, has a very strong Yorkshire accent in this song, it’s hard not to adopt this accent when singing it, and we always end up laughing during certain lyrics when you can tell this happens. I think fixing this would just be a case of regaining to laugh until this comes naturally to you eventually, which will make us look skilled on stage for the final performance. Obviously, we want to stay relaxed and be able to enjoy each other’s accompaniment but staying professional and looking well refined on stage is absolutely a must.
For next week, I could work with Lucy with the idea of me doing backing vocals. I tend to harmonise a lot with lucy just for fun and as experiments, but I think if we took this role more seriously, we could come out with some great products. Harmonising with the main vocal is a good idea, especially in acoustic sets as it helps to ass a thicker texture in the form of another vocal layer to quite a thin-sounding performance. It also works to put more emphasis behind certain lyrics or for whole parts of a song, the chorus, for example. If I were to work on harmonising, I would like to apply this to the rest of our set, however only where I feel the songs would need it as I don’t want to overdo it.
Targets For Next Week
-Learn Our third song, ‘Come Together’ by The Beatles.
-Work on harmonies with Lucy.
-Go back to ‘Someone You Loved’ from last week’s rehearsal to make sure we remember it and can play it back to back with this.