LO2 Be able to plan as a musical ensemble

LO2 2 Be able to plan as a musical ensemble

Forming an ensemble: ensemble types eg string quartet, rock band, jazz band, vocal group; auditions Choosing repertoire: resources eg music library, CD collections, online music players, sheet music, real booksChoosing roles: eg band leader, musical director, front person, administrator, publicist, choreographer.

9/11/12

Today we went into groups for a project we are going to start which is developing a music ensemble which I am really looking forward to doing. The project is to have 3 songs, they can be covers of originals, and just do them ourselves in our groups, then record them, during this procedure we need to be writing about what we have done, so whether that's just writing in our blogs, or actually getting audio or video's of our discussions, or rehearsals  which we will then post onto our blogs and add writing too. My group for this project is, Daisy, Archie, Charlie, and Jack.

Me, Daisy, Archie and Jack are all singers. Archie also plays guitar, and Charlie plays guitar also. Jack plays a bit of piano, we are even perhaps going to try and use a bit of percussion so me and Daisy can get involved in the instruments too.

So today, after we had figured out our groups we then went into a practice room to think of ideas and just have a listen to some songs that we could perhaps do. We also may do an original song. As it was just our first time thinking of songs we didn't quite know what songs to pick yet and what genre we wanted to be, but we did know we wanted to mix it up a bit and have a bit of everything. Our group is quite lucky really as we all have similar/the same taste in music so picking a song shouldn't be too much of a difficult task. However we did choose a few songs which we are thinking of doing. 

Our ideas so far are: 

• The kooks 
• Jamie T (Sheila)
• Kings of Leon (Pyro, Milk)
• Foals (Spanish Sahara) 
• Alt J 
• The Maccabees

We haven't really all got specific roles, we decided it would be a good idea if we just all take part in each part of the process of this project. We don't want to leave it down to just one person so getting everyone involved is something that is highly important. Archie and Charlie will be in charge of getting the music down, as in the instruments etc, and me and Daisy and Jack will need to make sure we know our words and sort out any harmonies we want to include, but the boys can still get involved in this, and we are all open to ideas and suggestions. 

14/12/12

In today's class we all really focused on going through both the songs as much as we could to look at any bits that really needed perfecting and extra work on. We also filmed that class and it's on YouTube and I will upload the link for that, we filmed it so we could look at what we needed to change, we found that we all didn't really know the words very well which completely can affect your whole performance as a whole, if you're not confident with the words then it can be hard to perform to your fullest potential so this is something that we really need to work on. 

We chose our final song which is called Pompeii, by Bears Den. Charlie chose this song and we were all really pleased with it and looking forward to trying it on Monday's lessons. We all went home and learnt this song. On this day that Charlie introduced this song to us, him and Archie already had the music down, Archie on bass and Charlie on acoustic guitar, it sounds great, now all we need to do is add the vocals, which will be Daisy and I.

We are ready to perform Milk, although we do need to work on the lyrics more as well, but at the moment we're wanting to focus on Sheila and this new song more. Next lesson our target is to try the song Pompeii.

Video of us rehearsing Milk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwf_61ikkNQ  (sorry about the title on youtube its muddled up, but it is milk)

19/12/12

As we have an assessment tomorrow in today's lesson at the beginning we took about 15-20 minutes on setting up everything that we need for tomorrow, including, amps, guitars-acoustic and electric, microphones and microphone stands. We cleared everything out of the way so there is plenty of room for us tomorrow. 

After we had done this, we took the time for each group to go through a sound check with their three songs, and give them all ago to see how they were getting along, we also gave each other a bit of feed back to see what perhaps we could improve on. 

I think this went really well it made us see what we need for tomorrow and what we may need to rehearse extra on, our group need to work on the lyrics still which we are quite struggling with, especially on one of the songs due to it being quite fast, especially the boys are finding it difficult to do two things at once (guitar and sing). We do think we have tried our hardest and it really has come along the best it could have. 

The plan for tomorrow is to come in about 1 or 2 hours earlier to try and have a little more rehearsing time in the live room on the microphones, and then about half 2 we are doing the assessment which will be filmed and I will upload to my blog when this has been done.