Whew, am I ever behind in this!
I came back to Amy's from the Bull Ring on Friday to find that Sam had messaged a few people for an emergency booking. I asked if there were any slots left and they were kind enough to give me five songs. Interestingly this was downstairs at Katies; it's not Acoustic Brew so there were supposed to be full bands on. There wasn't a band tonight, but hey, I do what I can.
It didn't get off to a flying start as I kicked off with Bitterness and forgot what song I was playing. It sounds silly but there is a reason for it: Apart from the far larger amount of spite and agression I put in to Bitterness, the intro to it sounds almost exactly the same as Girl's Names, same chord and everything. (Which, incidentally, is why I never put those two songs together in the set list.) So it took me a minute to remember what to do next, which thankfully I passed of as the overlong introduction I sometimes do to Bitterness when I play it first. Apart from that, it all went OK, but my mind probably wasn't in the right place when I kicked off that night!
I followed it up with the fairly predictable Get out of my Head, which actually seems to be more consistent with how well it's going down these days, pleasing to see. Can't say why, maybe I'm playing the relatively difficult song with more confidence these days and it's coming across. I'd like to think so. However, because of the way the sound was mixed, I noticed a few errors. One thing I really shouldn't be doing is playing the A string when I hit the D minor chord, but those bass frequencies were really ringing out through the monitor so I could hear I was doing that a lot. This is especially important in a solo situation because I haven't got a bass player to hit those low notes; it's all coming from me. I shouldn't be wanting Ds and playing As. That one might need a bit more practice.
Then I lent my cement-mixer-like voice to The Kill by 30 Seconds To Mars. Since I've been playing this song I've since discovered that there is an acoustic version of this song already by the band themselves, but in front of the right audience this will never go down badly as long as I play it correctly. Tonight was no exception and when I spoke to some people after the show, this was the one that they remembered. Fine, but I don't like to play the same cover twice in rapid succession; I'll end up boring myself and anyone who comes to see me more than a couple of times a month. Still, that's a good one to break out if it's going a bit flat and my audience is roughly my age or younger!
Girl's Names is a song I think I will play every time I play Katies because this is the one people tend to remember and sing along to when I come back a month later. I enjoy it a lot more now than I did when I first started playing it live, even the 12/8 bit doesn't sound so pretentious to me now! It didn't go down a storm, but then again my mid-set jobbers rarely do once the novelty has worn off. To be honest I don't think I could have done this one much better, and I'm thankful for that!
I finished off with Storm from the North. This one takes me back to my Crashpoint days, not least because the song is about the band, but also because of its position in the set. I remember when the band wrote Get This Manic Off Me; we had one more gig at the Wharf Bar to do before J left the band. J came up with the riff, we wrote the song and thought, "Wow, this is actually really really good!" It was a bit of a gamble but we started the set with the song that we usually finish with, and ended the set with the new song, because we knew it was amazing and we would play it well whatever happened. It was a bit of a shame I never learned the words to it so I could carry the song on after Emma left the band, but then again we were never really the same after that last show with J anyway. We got a little bit better, but...
To return from my digression, I've noticed a couple of things about this song, the first of which is that I forget the words to it; it's always the last bit as well. Thankfully, that night, there was only Amy in the audience who knew what the song was supposed to sound like in the first place, so nobody else seemed to notice that when I was plucking a melody on my top strings it was purely because I didn't know what else to sing. The second thing is that it's a little too low for me to sing comfortably. Normally in this situation I would use a capo, but that's not an option for me with this song. Remember those instrumental sections between the chorus and the verse? Well, that's supposed to have a tin whistle in them. The whistle that I have, whether I like it or not, has a range of D to about high B, I think, the same as a descant recorder. Which means that the best key for me to play in is G or Em. So I can only really play the song in Em. Is it possible to work on my voice so I can sing lower and still make a convincing sound? Time will tell...
Well that's it for the time being, I've got two more gigs to write up but I'm going to have a break for now. See you soon...
No comments:
Post a Comment