This was our mock performance for the show on the 18th and overall I think it went quite well. I’m gonna go through the performance and pick out points that we did well in, but also where we failed to do well. To start off we came in looking nervous. Our entrance wasn’t the best as there was no interaction with the crowd and we all came on with our heads down. We might benefit from interacting more when coming on, or at least looking more confident when entering. After our entrance, we stood tuning and sorting out our instruments for 4-5 minutes. We need to cut this right down as it is not enjoyable for the audience to watch and causes a disturbance in the set. After this, we were ready to play.
Where is my mind?- This is by far the strongest song in the set. We played the song from start to finish with no interruptions. We all played well together as a band and we played with confidence. This song was particularly strong as all of us knew what we were doing. The issue I had with this song was that the guitar Oliver plays was out of tune. This made the song sound terrible. The singer was also too quiet so she was hard to hear both on stage and in the audience. I played my parts pretty accurately throughout this song, but I could have added some live sound in the intro of the song to make my piano parts go from quiet to loud. Overall this is a good start to the set, there are just a few bits that need to be sorted out.
Island in the sun- This has to be the worst song in the set. The band was unclear when this song was starting and it was a very staggered start. Oliver’s Guitar was still horrifically out of tune. This is what ruined the song. The solo Oliver played was very noticeably wrong, the notes were right but the tuning of the guitar was way off still. This was my main problem with this song. The rest of the song was not too bad. This was not my best performance either, there were a few parts where I went out of time and played the wrong notes. However, throughout all of the problems, we carried on with the song and played till the end. At least the set carried on and did not grind to a halt.
505- Like pixies, this was a really good performance of this song. We played in unison together as a band and sounded pretty tight in the way we played. we played the song from start to finish with no interruptions which allowed the set to flow nicely. I performed quite well in this song, however, I needed to add more variations to the chords I was playing. I need to play the chords faster sometimes and then sometimes slower. I can also play them at different lengths to better complement the track. At this point, we had not performed this song very much, so it sounded nice to say we were under-rehearsed.
Overall, this performance was good. I wouldn’t be happy to put this on in front of people yet as it still needs some work, but it is definitely getting there. We really need to work on our stage presence in order to make this a good final performance. We have some way to go, but we are definitely on the right track and are in a good place for 5 weeks.