Our assessment on the 11th of March went very
well on the whole but there are still ways that we can improve and ways that I
can improve. Almost all of the songs themselves I played almost as well as I
thought I could have and on overall I thought the transitions between songs
were pretty fluid. One time there was quite a large gap between two songs where
we were just awkwardly standing around but that’s because we thought the
production arts students needed to sort something out before we could continue.
Now I’ll start talking about what went wrong as a band and
ways that we can improve for next time (26th March). The most
glaring issue is that we hadn't finished writing one of our four originals and
instead of having a concrete structure we all just improvised around the 12-bar
blues in G and when it came to finishing the song it was very abrupt and awkward.
We have been working on a more solid structure and Emily has been writing
lyrics so that next time around we will have a finished song like we should
have had. Another issue we had is that we had to restart ‘Teenagers’ because
Emily got the key wrong and called for us to stop and try again. It had only
been about 5 seconds but having a false start really isn't ideal and since then
Emily has sorted this out so next time there won’t be any false starts. I know
there wasn't really a crowd but I think that we need to interact a little bit
more and at least just say what we’re playing before each song. Normally that
would be Emily’s job but there definitely are songs which Emily doesn't sing so
Matt, Ben, Tim or I should really address the audience and tell them what’s
happening.
Next, I’ll talk about issues that I personally had and how I’m
going to deal with those. To be honest, the only real problem that I had was
that I hadn't thought of an easy way to deal with changing guitars. My new
strat isn't particularly happy with being tuned down to Drop D tuning for the
two heavier songs in our setlist and would require a lot of onstage tuning to
settle into the new tuning. Instead I thought it would be better to just change
guitar but I realise that the way in which I implemented that wasn't as
professional or speedy as it could have been. I’m definitely going to look into
alternative options like having someone there to physically hand my second
guitar to me as I give them my first one, or perhaps having a guitar stand to
the side of stage or something. Either way, the changeover will be quicker and
less noticeable.
So overall I’d rate the performance something like 8/10
which is a respectably high score but there is a solid 20% room for improvement
next time round.
