Song 1 – About a Girl, Nirvana.
We started this song off strong, Clarke started us off by playing the intro, then after the intro drum fill we all joined in. Other than the fact I looked like I was glued to the ground and swaying like a tree, I believe that we nailed this song, this is the song we rehearsed the most and we were most confident with this song. Me and Lacey already performed this song twice before so we knew our parts. When we previously performed this song I played guitar not bass but it was pretty easy to adjust to playing bass because it’s the same thing apart from the fact that on guitar it plays chords and on bass it just plays the root notes of the chords. This song went really well, I think one part where I messed up is when we come out of the build up I switched from E to G a bit too quick but I played it off as it was a minor mistake. The ending was a bit messy because we end on the E and let it ring out but it was hard for me to go from playing the E and G progression to letting the E ring out because it was too fast and I’m not used to playing bass. Other than them to minor mistakes, the song went as well as it could have and I am proud of how we performed that song.
Song 2 – I sat by the Ocean, Queens Of The Stone Age.
For this song I’m on guitar, so I had to swap instruments between the first song and this song. When we finished the last song, Lacey announced the second song instantly so I thought they wanted to start playing it so I started rushing to change over. Faye plays the bass for us in this song and I was waiting for her to come out to hand her the bass but I was rushing so I tried to put it down, then she came out as I was putting it down and it was a little bit messy. We play this song way faster than the original tempo and i don’t really know why, I think it’s because every time we rehearsed, we rehearsed without drums and then when we finally did we were too fast and I think Evan just sped up to catch up with us and we never played it properly. Raising the Bpm up like that made it harder to play right, especially the arpeggio parts because i could barely do them at the original tempo. I messed up this part a little bit because i ended up just strumming the whole chords and it sounded a bit weird because it clashed with Clarke’s guitar playing octaves. The second chorus went well because we always struggled with the structure of it in rehearsals but when we played it we played everything in time. This chorus also didn’t go well because I messed up on some of the chords because we played it too fast, but I stayed in time and played along with Clarke. The end of the song was the messiest part because it goes from the second chorus straight into the 4 bar link section that plays really fast and then goes back into the chorus but only plays the second half of the chorus and then the song ends. These parts are really hard to switch between and it was difficult to learn and we kept messing it up in the rehearsals. Overall I think this song went pretty well because we played it well and the crowd seemed to like it.
Song 3 – plug in Baby, muse.
This song was by far the biggest challenge I have attempted, i don’t play bass and when I do, i don’t use a pick but for this song I had to. The way the notes are played just baffled me. It is played fast and the rhythm of it made no sense to me. I was trying my best to play it properly but I just couldn’t so I played it as close as I could, I played the same rhythm but not the same as the tabs. Between the verse and chorus there’s a little 4 bar build up to the chorus and I messed that up the first time around because I keep forgetting that it happens at that point. I could barely hear my bass, but I knew what I had to play and I was going off of what Clarke was playing and what Lacey was singing so I was confident that I was playing the right thing at the right time. I think I could’ve done better on this song if I learnt how to play the bass line like the original song, and also if I could have added the fuzz effect on the bass.