PROGRESS JOURNALS

WEEKLY PROGRESS JOUNAL ENTRIES

WEEK 1

College Practice

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As you can see in the video, the song is well put together and all the parts are working together well. Though the guitars should cut out in the verse as it sounds overcrowded in the verses with too much playing as you can hear at both 0:23 and 1:18. The Pre choruses could do with being a little more stripped down as too add more dynamic changes in to the chorus, I am going to stop using distortion at the Pre choruses to make it thinner, and give it a better contrast to the chorus. As you can see at 2:14, we forgot the bridge and went into another chorus, we later practiced the bridge as you can see in later videos. We took a lot of inspiration from Nirvana for the style of this song, I tried to play "worse", playing "wrong" notes in the power chords, for example I was playing an A power chord in the intro, but I was adding a D note into the chord, which Kurt Cobain often did while playing. I later practiced this further in my home practice

On the first week we started deciding on some songs for our setlist, the only song we focused on this week were "Criminal" by Fiona Apple, in which we changed the genre to better fit our setlist, you can see us performing this song in the video to the left. We kept the same chords and vocal melody. In the verses, we made the chords last half as long however, and sped the whole thing up, making it feel more gunge like. I also wrote aall my own parts. The way we approached it was that the other members learnt the song and I didnt, this way I could approach it without knowing the feel/genre beforehand, letting me write my own parts that better fit the genre.

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As you can see in this video, we worked on the bridge section due to how much we struggled with it during the other playthroughs. We also added some stabs to the start of the chorus, as to add some surprise to the final chorus.

Home Practice

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In this video I'm practicing the playing style of Kurt Cobain from Nirvana. Im trying to play worse on purpose, strumming close to bridge and hitting the strings harder than I usually would

WEEK 2

College Practice

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As you can hear at 1:14, the guitar is too quiet, and the verses overall sound too busy and not impactful enough. To fix these issues, we changed our guitar tones. I cut my mids and went for a more scooped tone, while brad went for a very rounded tone that focused on a good clean tone, because he needed a good clean setting for the verses. He kept his EQ at a more standard level. Olly added some more gain to his bass tone, and made it thinner by increasing the treble to imitate the tone of the Thunderbird bass that Krist Novoselic (Nirvana Bassist) used with Nirvana live. We also recorded some videos for social media, one of which ended up getting over 150 likes, this was a cover of Hard Times by Paramore and at the time it was a trend for bands to cover the song.

This week we focused on "All Apologies" by Nirvana. This was the first video we took. We were playing it too fast here, and we need to slow it down if we want to keep the vibe of the original. My tone in the intro needs to be a lot cleaner, and did fix this later in the session. I need to stand up and have better overall stage presence to put on a good performance at the cavern.

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As you can see in this video, we greatly improved the overall structure, sound and feel of the song. We slowed the song down, and now brad plays the verses whilst I join in on the verses. Before this we played a verse each, but now with only Brad on the verses it sounds much more put together and dynamically interesting.

Home Practice

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As you can see in this video, I am learning "Hey" by The Pixies, which we are playing at the gig, and learning next week. I am practicing my lead parts in both the Verse, Pre Chorus and Chorus. I have learnt the song in preparation for next week's session, so that we can quickly learnthe song and tighten it up.

WEEK 3

College Practice

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Everyone sounds unsure of themselves as it was our first run through, and we missed a lot of the sections out. The vocals sound good however, and are very fitting stylistically.

As you can see in the video on the right, we have cleaned up the song quite a lot, with everyone knowing their parts much better, but if you pay attention to the tempo in the first verse, at 0:24 for example, and compare it to later in the song, at 2:20 for example, we were rushing a significant amount.

As you can hear in this videos, we started out quite rough with this song. Some bass notes were wrong in the intro. Once the guitar comes in, the bass goes from G to E, when it should be G to F#. The chorus sounds weak and everyone sounds like they aren't enjoying themselves, and it sounds very flat. We also shouldn't be using a count in from Charlie at the beginning as it should be a smooth intro.

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We will change this by individually practicing our parts along to a metronome of the same tempo as the song. As you can hear at 0:32, the bass starts playing the wrong notes, we fixed this by going over the chords with just the guitar and bass, and figuring out what was going wrong.

Home Practice

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As you can hear in this video, i'm writing the original piece for our performance. We are recording the song soon, so I decided to finish the piece at home. I took a lot of inspiration from The Smashing Pumpkins for this song, and in this video i'm showing some of the parts and sections of the song.

WEEK 4

College Practice

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This was our first attempt of the day, but we had ran it once or twice in previous sessions, so at most it just needed tightening and some parts needed improving. For example, as you can hear at 0:22, some of the bass notes around this part came in late or were missed, which we tightened up by going through the intro just guitar and bass to tighten those changes. We also still need to figure out the ending of the song, due to the fact this will be the last song in the set. Therefore it needs a big ending with all everyone giving it their all. Me and Brad also need to improve our stage presence, which we are going to spend one of the upcoming sessions working on. We need to be giving it our all on that stage, and if we performed at our current state, the performance may fall short.

Final Setlist:

Hey - The Pixies

Criminal - Fiona Apple

Original

All Apologies - Nirvana

The Bends - Radiohead

This week, we focused on 'The Bends' by radiohead and how we will incorporate it into the setlist. Unfortunately, Poppy was not here this week, so we would have to also factor in where she would be in the performance of the bends. We decided that her and olly would sing different parts, with Olly singing the post chorus parts (For example, 1:40 in this video), Poppy would sing the main verses, and They would both do the chorus. We also talked about me joining in for the chorus, which is something we are going to experiment with when we have our next session with poppy.

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In this video, we were practicing implementing The Bends into the setlist. It is the final song in the set, and we play it right after All Apologies, which we played the outro of at the start to get a feel for the transition. The performane of the bends has stayed mostly the same, but we have cleaned up some elements, for example the bass is coming in at the right times and Olly is using a technique that he came up with to get a radio effect live, where he surrounds the mic with his hand (2:52) which imitates the effect used on the record

Home Practice

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As you can see in this video, I spent this week perfecting the solo parts I have in 'The Bends', as i found myself hitting wrong notes or sounding overall sloppy during my solos. I wanted to be able to mute all strings I didnt want to hear and then hit every string, to get an aggressive and impactful feel that jonny greenwood often uses in his playing, which greatly helps his feel whilst playing

I also uploaded my Poll for business work, and spent time going through data and promoting the form through my instagram and snapchat to get as much data as possible.

WEEK 5

Outside Of College

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This week we were off college, but I had a gig for my personal band in Manchester. We had been asked to support a band called disorder while they were on tour, on thier Manchester date. In this video we are performing an original song. This performance helped me gain further experience in performance, and let me practice my stage presence even further.

In this video you can see us practicing the song before the gig, the bridge part that we are playing is too busy so after the gig we decided to make it calmer by using the toms instead of the open hi hat to calm the dynamics of this part as right after it there is a big solo that needs more impact. As this was the newest song in our set, we had to practice this song more that any others, but we still ran the set a couple times.

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WEEK 6

College Practice

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As we approached the date of the Cavern gig, we stopped focusing on individual songs and instead focused on the composition of the performance instead. This video is a clip from the set where we played Criminal. As you can hear, we are a lot tighter and more accurate that we have been in the previous weeks.

This video is a clip of All Apologies, While it does sound better than passt weeks, you can hear that the bass is out of tune a little mainly in the intro (0:20), and the vocals are a little off in the high parts of the verse (0:27), which is mainly due to three people singing the same melody, making it sound a little overcrowded. We talked about how to fix this after the performance and decided to change the way we approached the chorus, with only 2 of us singing at once.

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This video is a clip of Hey from our setlist, as you can hear, the addition of the chorus pedal has greatly improved the sound of my lead guitar, but the chorus rate is too high making the tone wobble too much. Apart from that however, i'm very confident in the song and how much it has progressed, and i believe it will sound very strong on the night.

Home Practice

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In this video, I am fixing my chorus settings and tone, and practicing the parts for "Hey", as this was the song I felt needed the most work on my end. I needed to find the sweet spot between being too wobbly and not hearing it enough. I feel as though my ending tone has achieved this.

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