This morning was a huge improvement, Chris has made the conscious decision and swapped Lucy out of another band for Tom in our band as he feels Tom and another bassist have a better chemistry, likewise with Lucy and Lewis will now have which I am very happy about!
In our first rehearsal of the day we focused on “Purple Rain”, helping Lucy get the structure down and specific fills and breaks, along with the hidden time signature changes from 4/4 to 3/4 and back, which are hidden in plain sight when first listening to the song.
We have a back-up singer who stepped in during our first rehearsal to sing ‘Purple Rain’ as she already knew it. Despite the difficulty of not having a singer for most of our rehearsals this term we have found that rehearsing without a singer is helping us to become even more confident with our parts individually and as a band. It also means we have to have the structure memorised and work with each other even more to perfect our playing which is something we hope Chris will see shine through us when we perform in the live lounge and to a paying audience.
Within our second rehearsal, we ran through “Purple Rain” a couple times, but we also looked at the other songs. Me and Lewis already know the overall structure to “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Take Me With U” roughly, however we haven’t perfected them all and are still not quite sure on all the parts. Lucy found “Let’s Go Crazy” to have an incredibly drum part which became fairly entertaining to me, so she has decided to take it a step further and to try to adapt it and make it a bit more interesting.
“Take Me With U” has a very cool drum fill for a intro to a song and I bloody love it, Lucy learnt it by ear in rehearsal in under ten minutes which was very impressive considering shes limited to two toms. We played through the first verse and chorus with the band as a whole but we aren’t very confident when it comes to this song.
We then had a look at the Lenny Kravitz version of ‘When Doves Cry’ by Chris’ recommendation, and all of us agreed that it was a interesting arrangement, and that it would be a challenging to attempt it but incredibly fun on all ends.
Ellie Thornton Music 