For my initial assessment I decided to do a cover of So real by Jeff Buckley. I chose this piece because Jeff Buckley is one of my newer favourite artists and I wanted to learn a song by him, So real was the one I wanted to learn the most.
I had originally planned to perform this song with Clarke, but then plans changed and I had to find a backing track for the song. However this didn’t go very well as there were no backing tracks with no guitar so I had to just play it over the song. It was hard as there is no pause before the song starts so the beginning was very off time to the actual song but I managed to pull it together by the end of the intro.
I found my cover alright, it could have been better if I had done it with Clarke as I had originally practiced. The one thing that really went wrong is the bridge, which call the “chainsaw part”. I didn’t really know how that part went and I also needed a distortion pedal which I didn’t have so it ended making that part sound extremely bad and ruined the entire song. Apart from the intro and the bridge I think it sounded really good and was mostly in time and very fluent.
My favourite part of the song to play was definitely the end of the song and the rhythm and chords are really fun to play. My least favourite part obviously being the “chainsaw part” because I couldn’t get it right.
The song:
I am going to start learning harder pieces on guitar to improve my skills and mindset towards getting better. I will do this all year and do harder pieces each time. Doing this will help me become more confident on guitar.
I am going to work on my evaluation and research skills so that i am able to fully understand what i am doing, what i need to know and what i need to improve on, I will start doing this now and keep doing it throughout the year.
I am going to work on coming out of my comfort zone on guitar by playing more lead parts which need improvisation skills in. I also would like to include using pedals and working on tone for this. I will do this all year and have completed it by final project.