This is our first rehearsal of ‘I sat by the ocean’ by Queens of the Stone Age. We all learnt this song separately and then came together and played with everyone at the same time. We struggled to stay in time with each other and it sounded really messy and thrown together. I can’t play the chorus part properly because it’s an arpeggio picking style and I am struggling a lot playing it how it’s meant to be played so I am currently working on doing better on that, but when I can’t I just strum the chords lightly to make it sound as close to the original as I can. It doesn’t really sound too far off but it doesn’t sound quite right. As a whole band we need to stay in time and also focus on our dynamo changes within the song. I need to work on the chorus part and picking it like the way I need to to make it sound the nicest, to improve on this, I need to practice it more and the best way I can think of doing this is to play it slower and work my way up to the right tempo. Cody needs to learn the song properly because he is not playing the drum beat correctly and doesn’t know the fills properly, he also doesn’t know any of the stops. Before this rehearsal he said he hasn’t rehearsed it but he has listened to the song a lot and he thought he knew all of the drum parts but he didn’t. To improve his performance of this song he needs to practice playing it along side the track and also figure out a way to know where the stops are and knowing when to cut off. Clarke needs to keep practicing the intro and bridge part where he uses a slide because he goes a bit out of time and then speeds up to catch up to the rest of us and misses the right notes and plays the wrong notes which sound bad. He can improve on this by practicing and knowing where to slide up/down to and the right speed so it sounds good and smooth, practice makes perfect. Lacey needs to work on projecting her voice more and reaching the right notes and also the dynamic volume changes throughout the songs. She can improve on this by singing along to the song and recording herself and listening back to it and picking out the specific parts of the songs she needs to refine and work on more. As a whole band we need to enhance our sound by improving timing and also rehearsing our parts individually and also together because it’s harder to play together when you’re hearing notes clash between the two guitars. And messing up so I need to know what I’m playing and what Clarke is playing so it doesn’t clash in my head and mess me up. We also need to work on the ending of the song because that is the part that we always mess up on and we need to work on having it sound intentional instead of us just stoping at different times and making it sound messy.
For the next rehearsal the main things we need to focus on is knowing all of our individual parts and also knowing how they are supposed to sound all together. We need to work on the stop in the song after the first chorus and most importantly the ending of the song, for this we can either end the song how it ends in the original song, how they end it when they play it live or we can come up with our own ending to the song. We can also focus on changing from chorus to verse and vice versa to nail the changes and have them sounding better and more put together. We can also start to thing about how we are going to present our selves on stage while playing the song live, like figuring out where we are going to stand and how we’re going to look.