Shortly after the Christmas holidays we were set with our next project. For this there are two elements: creating a live lounge performance and creating a press pack/EPK. This blog is focusing on the meetings my band have been having over the past 4 weeks about our live lounge performance.

14/01/19

This week me and Luke ( fredianimusic.wordpress.com) needed to come up with a rough composition that we could perform in our live lounge. To do this we based our idea for a composition on some riffs/ideas that we each already had. We then chose which was our favourite out of the collection. The one that we chose was one of lukes’ that he had just created before the Christmas holidays. After listening to the song a couple of time I came up with a well suited bass line to play along with. We need to think about how we can bulk up the song a bit and consider other instruments we could use.

21/01/19

This weeks goal was to find other musicians within the course who were willing to help us out and play with us during our live lounge performance. We ended up with a group of 4 people: me on bass, Luke on rhythm guitar and vocals, Ryan on lead guitar (ryanlweismusician.wordpress.com) and Tom on drums (tfrzmusic.wordpress.com). Luke has also started to work on some lyrics for the song- here are the lyrics and the structure so far:

VERSES

Walking out among the trees, Hearing animals so free, With the sunlight streaming through the -canopy

Feeling the ocean breeze, Standing cliffs and lonely seas, Moments alone with thoughts that help me see

CHORUS

Highlands at night, Under star-light, Reminds me of The happiness in life, There with you,Grey herons flew, I long to go back To inverewe

VERSE

Walking out among the trees, Hearing animals so free, With the sunlight streaming through the -canopy

Feeling the ocean breeze, Standing cliffs and lonely seas, Moments alone with thoughts that help me see

28/01/19

With the final performance coming up, me and Luke needed to get ourselves in gear. This week we focused on trying to get the song together and be able to play it all the way through and make it tighter. We decided to let Ryan do the harmonics part of the song on the electric guitar as he is playing lead guitar and it makes it easier for Luke to be able to go straight into the next verse/chorus. We also developed the ending a bit and made it “heavier”- meaning we really went for it and used more crashes/ rides on the drum kit. Here is the result:

VERSES

Walking out among the trees, Hearing animals so free, With the sunlight streaming through the -canopy

Feeling the ocean breeze, Standing cliffs and lonely seas, Moments alone with thoughts that help me see

~PRE-CHORUS~

CHORUS

Highlands at night, Under star-light, Reminds me of The happiness in life, There with you,Grey herons flew, I long to go back To inverewe

~INSTRUMENTAL #1~

VERSE

Walking out among the trees, Hearing animals so free, With the sunlight streaming through the -canopy

Feeling the ocean breeze, Standing cliffs and lonely seas, Moments alone with thoughts that help me see

~PRE-CHORUS~

CHORUS

Highlands at night, Under star-light, Reminds me of The happiness in life, There with you,Grey herons flew, I long to go back To inverewe

~INSTRUMENTAL #2/OUTRO~

 

04/02/19

Over the weekend I met up with Luke in Paignton and torquay to gather some extra materials needed for our performance to make the video look a bit more exciting. We only ended up buying some fairy lights as we couldn’t really think of what else to use (it was also really bad weather and we wanted to go home). We had previously done the majority of the preparations for the performance on Friday so this left us with plenty of time to chill out a bit, rehearse and to mentally prepare ourselves for performing in front of cameras- we were all quite camera shy.

Me and Luke did our performance on the Friday: we ended up with the same camera crew as the groups on Friday but they had all switched roles which didn’t turn out so well for us. The camera footage we had received wasn’t as “professional” looking as we would have liked or as it was for the other groups that had performed the day before, however we couldn’t expect it to look as great as some of the stuff on the tv as the camera crew were students from the college who were also still learning how to film in a professional way. The footage we got wasn’t completely unusable it was just a bit awkward for us as it was filmed in short 10 second clips- making it more fiddly when it came to editing the video, making it not that realistic to edit it together in the time we had. Furthermore, even if we had the time to do all of this, the quality of filming would make it not worth while. However the blame doesn’t only go on the footage, but also the attitude of the whole group. Our performance was last meaning people were getting tired and easily agitated. We were getting annoyed as a band because we had to stand on the stage for half an hour, whilst people were trying to fix an un-explainable failure with the drum kit and mics were giving off a buzzing sound, before we could even do our first take fro the video. By the time it came to the band actually performing, everybody was nervous and Luke felt as though his throat was really dry but couldn’t get the attention of somebody in the audience to get a drink- therefore effecting his vocals. The whole performance felt forced and unnatural. Both me and Luke had quite high hopes for this performance but it just didn’t really go to plan and it was something we later discussed outside of college on our way home.