practice diary 3

Today we began to look at dynamics and tempo within the song mainly during the bridge.

We used our time this week to work on the bridge. As the bridge has a dramatic dynamic drop and a tempo change this means the group have to listen to my drumming as it is the lead of the song, And the drums set the tempo. During the bridge the other instruments drop out and drums play alone for two bars which introduce the tempo and dynamic change. when playing the bridge everyone plays a chord and holds it for 2 bars. With this we wanted to focus on everyone playing at the same time. However our main focus for this lesson was to work on the dynamics to build an atmosphere within the song to also create tention and a build up to the last chours of the song. 

as a group we wanted the bridge to sound more open, so as the drummer i used an open hi hat to create this effect. We have set our self a target of two weeks to get the tempo and dynamics up to a standard wich we would be happy to perform. 

practice diary 2:

Today we started practicing Amy Winehouse - back to black. when starting practice we each learned our parts individually, once we got a basic idea of what we were playing we came together and began to work on the intro to the song. it began to show that we had never played with other people in an ensemble before.this meant that we had trouble keeping in time with each other. we realised we had to listen to each other and communicate to work better with each other as an ensemble, everyone had to try and listen to everyone within the group and not just to listen to themselves for example the count in at the beginning. I as the drummer, need to count us all in at the right tempo so the group need to listen to me to know the tempo after the four count.

Practice diary 1:

Today we are looking at what song choices we want to learn as an ensemble. As a group we are going to brainstorm lots of songs we think that we want to perform, we will play these songs to measure the difficulty and make sure that we have a realistic outcome for our performance in December. we would like to narrow these down to four songs, we believe that four songs is an achievable goal for us to look into as a group for starting point taking us up to the October half term.

we feel that by choosing four songs we will be able to show our technical ability and to be able to explore different genres within music, we are giving ourselves up to October half term.