Day: Jan 29, 2020

Recently our bass player decided to leave the band and take a path into management rather than performance as it is something, he is more comfortable with and he was admittedly holding us back musically. This has left us without a bassist set in stone, however our lecturer has volunteered himself to step in when we need him to be. This has changed our band a bit in how we rehearse and what sound we have been left with in comparison to others. It also left us wondering what styles of music we could try to tackle without a key element to most music, and after watching other college bands perform at our Christmas gig and previous events, we thought about how beneficial it would be to have a keyboard player join our roster to help fill the bassists space. 

We tried to speak to both key players in the year below us before the Christmas break, asking if either of them would be interested in joining our band along and giving them some songs to look at during out time back. Out of the two of them, one of them came back to us after Christmas having learning all of them and after rehearsing with him the change it brings texturally is shocking. We are currently playing ‘Juice’ by Lizzo, ‘Good as Hell’ also by Lizzo and ‘Don’t Start Now’ by Dua Lipa with him on keys. All of them are very keyboard heavy, so adding a keyboardist was a very good choice as trying to recreate keyboard parts on a guitar is challenging and I learnt that when we first started looking at Prince’s tracks… 

As a band we think the next step will be for him to learn our Prince songs, which we have been playing without any keys and me trying to fill in everything on my guitar. I will finally be able to play my true parts and fulfil the whole three-minute solo within ‘Purple Rain’ without cutting it short as we have done previously.  

I have finally decided to invest my hard-earned money into some guitar effects pedals to add textually to our performance. There is a significant use of delay on the guitar in ‘Juice’ by Lizzo, so accordingly I got delay pedal to improve our performance, at the moment I am just trying to figure out how many milliseconds to delay it by which is tricky, but I am sure I will get it. Alongside that new pedal, the Wah pedal will be making a return within “Kiss” and “When Doves Cry” it took a bit of getting used to but I have now mastered it, a wah pedal simply alters the tone and frequencies of the guitar signal to create a distinctive sound, mimicking the human voice saying the onomatopoeic name “wah-wah” which Prince clearly loved as it is featured in a lot of his tracks.  

I have also been using a chorus pedal in ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince and in a couple other songs where it seeks fit, this pedal thickens the texture of the guitar, making it sound like multiple guitars are playing at once which can get a bit messy if the settings aren’t used correctly…  

These expensive new and old additions to our setup, as well as the addition of the drummers SPD-SX (a sample pad), are really pushing our bands capabilities. They are going to make our band look and sound a lot more professional in comparison to others which is always a win in my book and not mention how we are also learning a lot about how to develop our setup!