this is the video Nic has recorded of our band practice. I am the drummer in the band. Here we are all getting a lot of helpful tips. the beginning of the song started out okay it could’ve been a lot better as a band. we start off pretty well however as the chorus approaches we all get slightly confused. At 0:27 Nic helps me understand where to pause and count to four then hit the crash again and jump back straight into the verse. overall as a band we all need to improve on something to make this sound even better.
Here again started off okay and getting closer to the chorus i get confused and miss a couple of beats which then confuses the band and we all lagged and soon stopped playing.
Here is another band practice much better than the ones before. During all of the practices the whole band was present which made it better and easier for all of us to get better at the song. At around 1:10 there is a 4 beat pause which everyone has to do however we all counted the beat wrong in our heads and started at different times which caused a slight delay but we did pause which was something we didn’t quite grasp before so that’s an improvement. At 2:00 you can hear that i get confused with where we are in the song and play an extra beat but soon realise and stop playing. The 4 beat count went much better there there was little to no delay and we got to play more of the song just then came the solo which needed a fill at a certain time that was when the guitar hit E but i did it slightly before which didn’t really sound awful but then i had to catch up to the rest of the band and then it was just messy from there and we stopped playing. overall we all improved. For me i had to practice when to stop and start and when to do the fill.
Here is a video from the live room where we had the whole class listen to each groups practice. The starting of song went really nicely we was all quite on time there were times where i would miss the snare and hit the rim so that’s something i have to practice there were also times where we would be a bit delayed which can be heard at some point in the video. the solo part went okay however is needs a lot of improvement with the fill and the timing because there was a delay which kind of stopped Oliver playing for a split second at around 2:27 but he saved it in time and jumped straight back into it so that was really good. We kind of managed to slip back into the song and still play without stopping at a mistake . It took me a little while to catch up on that but i have watched the videos over and over again to look for mistakes that could be improved and this was one of them. we have improved since our first practice and im happy we didn’t stop we carried on playing. The ending was a mess! we definitely didn’t practice the ending that much as can be heard which is disappointing because the ending is important we all stopped at the wrong time Isobel carried on which was the right thing to do because we was two beats behind before the ending. we all got confused and tried to save it which was obviously too late so we practiced the ending more.
This in my opinion doesn’t sound as good as we can play maybe its the audio but im not very impressed with my drumming there i messed up a couple of times where i knew exactly not to mess up on i have no clue why i did. we are much more in sync and we managed to figure out the 4 beat pause pretty well. we improved on the solo much more i got the fill in time and Oliver did not get confused by me again so that’s an improvement. I still need to work on my snare i keep missing and hitting the rim and that’s maybe because i keep trying to focus on making a rim shot to make it sound more powerful to match as it is in the original song. Great improvement from us all is that we managed to do the ending pretty smooth with little to no complications and didn’t sound too bad overall i am sure i can improve on many more things like keeping the volume of the kit at the same level and hitting the snare not the rim which could be fixed by lowering and tilting the snare kit. I don’t know why i didn’t do that i just played the Drum kit as it was set up which was not a smart idea so that’s also something i should consider next time and maybe that will help me improve.
As you can see from these three videos we have been practicing more on pixies and trying to sound in sync. we all have learnt the parts of the whole song we have experimented with sound so in some videos the bass and drums are louder. in the third video i stopped all of us because the kick pedal wasn’t comfortable and kept sliding forwards we fixed this later by placing the amp in front of the kick to stop it from sliding.
Here we have decided on what we need to work on to make this whole thing sound better. we have figured out that structure and communication were the main things that were kind of slowing us down to get through the full song.
As you can see this was the first practice of island in the sun and from what i see i think it went really smooth especially with the into we just jumped straight into it and carried on playing. there were some mistakes that needed improvement which we later had a discussion about.
our singer was not in for that day so Luke decided to sing for this practice and i think it sounded well as it was our second recording of the song and we got through the whole song with little to no mistakes .
Here is our soundcheck we saw what needed to be turned up or down in my case the drums i didnt really enjoy playing on the kit then as the kick pedal was making a noise and the whole drum kit was just not the thing im used to everything felt heavy and just out of place so that kind of influended me to play the way i did which i dont think was great at all. However this problem was fixed later on and adjustments were made which helped a lot but still didnt feel just right.
unfortunately we only have this video of 505 im not sure wether the other videos got lost of just never sent however practicing 505 i think was the most challenging out of all the songs we have practiced. we tried different methods different tempos and even tried changing the singer or have two singers but this was not the problem. The problem was timing Robert and Oliver were slightly delayed with each other. And drumming for me was confusing as they were delayed and i didnt know when i was meant to hit the snare and hi-hat. we had a band discussion and wrote down what we needed to practice we watched different cover bands play this song and picked out specific parts of the song we could learn from. to fix the delay problem i gently tapped the rim to count everyone in and throughout the pauses of the song which later stopped during the rehearsals and everyone knew the timing of the song and count back in after a pause.
This is the video i showed everyone when we was discussing the delay and what needed to be fixed. i thought it would be a good idea to look at someone else play the song Aswell to pick out certain things we can do to help each other.
These two videos are topping and tailing we were practicing the into and outro of the songs the kick pedal for me was making a horrible echo sound which disturbed everything i played. unfortunately this couldnt be fixed so we had to just play as it was and we went through the practice with minor mistakes that were later improved on.