Dammit and blast your eyes!!!

Despite my schoolboy error of leaving the lyric/chord sheets for all the acoustic songs I wanted to try at home, a fairly productive rehearsal was had in the end.  I dedicated the first part of the rehearsal to the set and although I did have the lyrics to hand, I tried to run through all of the songs without looking at them and it went rather well.

There were stumbles and if the gig were tomorrow then there's still no way I could do it without at least cheat sheets BUT that said, I don't think I'm that far away from having the lyrics memorised (and if you know how bad my memory is, you know how much of a statement that actually is!).

I'm feeling quite confident about the set now although if the set list is confirmed as being 45 mins, it's looking likely that I'll need to add another song.  So far I've got "Crazy Horses" by The Osmonds as a standby but seeing as the crowd is going to be made up mostly of office workers at around the 20-40 year old age bracket, another 80's electro-pop tune to go with "Two Tribes" would likely go down better as a set closer.

Something to think about and discuss with the band once we're all together, I think.

My safety net

The main takeaways for the set this week are:

• The first and last verses in Punch & Judy need worked on.  
• Still need to remember to start History Repeating in a higher register.

Other than that, it's just a case of getting confident about singing without the lyric sheets.  If I can nail that before I get together with the band I'll be a VERY happy bunny indeed.



For the second part of the rehearsal I dedicated to learning acoustic songs.

Strummin' Time

I spent quite a bit of time running through "What a Good Boy" by Barenaked Ladies but focused mostly on getting the vocals sorted to the expense of working on the arrangement for the acoustic guitar.  Still, it was time well spent as I feel I'm quite close to how I want the vocals to sound now.  Next week I'll focus more on the guitar side of things and hopefully, will have it finished by the end of the session.

I filmed all the takes, put them together in a mashup video and created a playlist on YouTube imaginatively called "Learning a Song".  I figured it's something I'd find quite interesting to watch so maybe others would as well.

My initial thought was to do it for just one song but seeing as I keep thinking of other tunes I'd like to play, I reckon I'll keep this going and see what happens.  I find it really useful to listen back to the takes as it's so much easier to not only identify mistakes but to also hear what changes in the arrangement I'd like to make too.

You can check it out and see how you think its going below:

I've also been busking a few other songs at the same time as working on "What a Good Boy" and I think the next one to properly work out will be "As Long As I Can See The Light" by Creedence Clearwater Revival.  It's not sounding too bad at the moment so I'm confident I can have that knocked into shape reasonably quickly.

Famous. Last. Words.