I came tonight with the intention of airing a new song that I like to call One More Show. I think I might have blogged the actual song itself up ages ago but I've not had chance to play it live yet simply because I haven't practiced it enough. I've had enough of playing songs before they're ready and forgetting the words, and did not want that to happen the first time I played it so I went to some lengths to make sure that I'd got it right. All things considered, I doubt it would have made much difference. Due to the running order I'd actually gone on quite late, and most of the clientele were out the back, so I was playing to near enough an empty room, and the people who remained behind were paying very little attention. Here's what happened:
I began with Storm From The North; a break from the norm but as Katies Open Night attracts a lot of the local musos I figured they might appreciate me playing this one tonight. I played it well, though I left out the Metallica bit; not the right atmosphere, and the pounding verses and the choruses attracted some glances, but other than that what was left of the audience remainded largely impassive.
One More Show was next. I was pleased with the fact that after all that I actually DID manage to play it all the way through without any mistakes. Unfortunately my confidence had been knocked by the way the night had been going so far and I didn't feel right introducing the song as new, or even introducing myself. I think what we had here was the nature of the night having a knock-on effect on the way I was conducting myself, and because I lacked that connection with the audience I was what I was; a guy on a stage playing a guitar and singing something. So whether the song went down well or not, I couldn't honestly say.
I finished off with Right Where It Belongs by Nine Inch Nails, inspired by one of the other guys who was playing Hurt earlier. This is one I've known how to play for a while but never really played before; it needs a bleak and melancholic atmosphere to make it work I think. Sam commented on it when I'd finished, saying it was really nice. The rest of the people in the room had to be reminded to clap.
All in all, not one of my better ones, I think! I don't expect too much from Katies Open Night anymore but this was a disappointment. However it's not something I think any amount of planning and preperation (and for what it's worth, I don't do a great deal of either) could have effected; it just wasn't my night tonight. Let's hope the next one works a little better.
Sunday 19 June 2011
Tuesday 14 June 2011
8/6/2011: The Hartley Arms Open Mic Night
Sometimes when I'm doing gigs, it all seems to come together. This was one of those nights...
I kicked off with Get Out Of My Head again as usual, but this time I decided to start it with the 'drum' beat on my guitar while singing the first verse and chorus. I didn't hit the first chord quite as well as I should have done, but for those who have heard me play that song before (and there were at least 6 of you there!) it should have been a refreshing change to keep things interesting. It did seem to go down very well!
Bitterness was next, and I was told by Amy afterwards that this one was very good indeed. Apart from fluffing up one of the chords I didn't notice anything different, but I don't expect I had to; this one's a crowd pleaser that I really ought to do at every show. I interrupted the song with the quiet part by telling the audience of my fears of my hand going through the guitar when I do the 'bang bang bang' bit; it will be as good an excuse as any to get a new one, but it will be a shame if that happens to my Dad's old Hondo! This is one of the songs that lends itself well to a band environment, and I remember jamming it with Cj in the latter days of Crashpoint; that part would have been done by the kick drum. Funnily enough Elliot turned up later and when he asked me what I played, he identified this song by singing the 'Hey now' bit... catchy!
Then, fulfilling it's role as the mid-set epic, I played Storm from the North, after explaining briefly to the audience of how the song came about, and that writing about how I'll never be a band with my former bandmates again is kind of ironic since I'm now in a new band with Cj and another band with Rich. But, we'll never be Crashpoint again, that's my point... and I also decided to have a bit of fun with it and go into the introduction to Nothing Else Matters when the song goes slow again. Sam thought it was really funny once he realised what I was doing, this could have taken longer than it was supposed to because I didn't play it very well. I won't do that too often; it has to be the right kind of demographic to get the joke and it would only really work if I'd played my own song to the same crowd enough times for them to realise that I AM only joking and not trying to rip off Metallica. But it was good fun when I did.
While I was 'finishing off' with We Will Survive I had a bit of a think about what to do afterwards; people seemed to be playing 5 songs tonight rather than the usual 4 so not wanting to be left out I wanted to play something else at the end of the set. I'm happy to say that the fact that my mind wandered did not hinder my performance at all; I'm finally in a position where I can play this song all the way through!
The song I finished with was Just A Day by Feeder, because after playing a set like that I was in far too good a mood to play anything else! I hadn't practiced this for a while, certainly not with the intention of playing it live; the mistakes were there and I know it. But it's good fun and I delivered it with the conviction that it needs to make it a good performance nonetheless.
All in all very pleased with how it went tonight. If only all gigs went this good...
I kicked off with Get Out Of My Head again as usual, but this time I decided to start it with the 'drum' beat on my guitar while singing the first verse and chorus. I didn't hit the first chord quite as well as I should have done, but for those who have heard me play that song before (and there were at least 6 of you there!) it should have been a refreshing change to keep things interesting. It did seem to go down very well!
Bitterness was next, and I was told by Amy afterwards that this one was very good indeed. Apart from fluffing up one of the chords I didn't notice anything different, but I don't expect I had to; this one's a crowd pleaser that I really ought to do at every show. I interrupted the song with the quiet part by telling the audience of my fears of my hand going through the guitar when I do the 'bang bang bang' bit; it will be as good an excuse as any to get a new one, but it will be a shame if that happens to my Dad's old Hondo! This is one of the songs that lends itself well to a band environment, and I remember jamming it with Cj in the latter days of Crashpoint; that part would have been done by the kick drum. Funnily enough Elliot turned up later and when he asked me what I played, he identified this song by singing the 'Hey now' bit... catchy!
Then, fulfilling it's role as the mid-set epic, I played Storm from the North, after explaining briefly to the audience of how the song came about, and that writing about how I'll never be a band with my former bandmates again is kind of ironic since I'm now in a new band with Cj and another band with Rich. But, we'll never be Crashpoint again, that's my point... and I also decided to have a bit of fun with it and go into the introduction to Nothing Else Matters when the song goes slow again. Sam thought it was really funny once he realised what I was doing, this could have taken longer than it was supposed to because I didn't play it very well. I won't do that too often; it has to be the right kind of demographic to get the joke and it would only really work if I'd played my own song to the same crowd enough times for them to realise that I AM only joking and not trying to rip off Metallica. But it was good fun when I did.
While I was 'finishing off' with We Will Survive I had a bit of a think about what to do afterwards; people seemed to be playing 5 songs tonight rather than the usual 4 so not wanting to be left out I wanted to play something else at the end of the set. I'm happy to say that the fact that my mind wandered did not hinder my performance at all; I'm finally in a position where I can play this song all the way through!
The song I finished with was Just A Day by Feeder, because after playing a set like that I was in far too good a mood to play anything else! I hadn't practiced this for a while, certainly not with the intention of playing it live; the mistakes were there and I know it. But it's good fun and I delivered it with the conviction that it needs to make it a good performance nonetheless.
All in all very pleased with how it went tonight. If only all gigs went this good...
Wednesday 8 June 2011
1/6/11: The Maverick Jam Night
And now for something completely (but not really) different...
I decided to go down The Maverick again and was pleasantly surprised to see Andy Fisher from Wordsley School down there; a really great guy who runs a terrific music department at his school. I also came across Pete who'd played drums with me before, so after recruiting Matt once again on bass and dashing off to my car to get my Strat, we began...
To be honest this suffered from the electric guitar. I guess when I'm playing my own stuff on my acoustic I take it for granted the dynamic range of the instrument, e.g. if you play soft you get a soft sound and if you play hard you get a more aggressive sound, whereas with the electric it basically depends on how the amp is set up and how loud it is, which for Get Out Of My Head was far too loud. Also, because the amp I was plugged in to was on the opposite side of the stage to the bass player, that made it almost impossible for Matt to see what I was doing, so he was finding it hard to follow my chords. They did their best, fair play to them, but by comparison I think it sounded a lot more messy than it did when I did the same thing with the acoustic guitar a few weeks past. Bitterness didn't sound too good either for the same reason, though at least the electric guitar was the sound I had in mind for it when I first wrote the song. The sound of the guitar was far too bright but as I was borrowing an amp, I shouldn't complain.
I didn't want to play Prisoner Of My Mind again after the last time (if you missed that blog, VERY broadly, the band liked it, the audience not so much.) and I was at a loss to which other of my own songs to play. We Will Survive would probably fit the bill but I need a guitar player capable of playing the DragonForce style pyrotechnics I'm planning for that one! So I decided to switch to covers. After establishing that none of the band knew Walkin' On The Sun, I elected to run with Local Boy In The Photograph, since we'd been talking about Stereophonics earlier and it's easy enough to follow the chords. This went fairly well and was probably the best song we played on the night, not necessarily the right venue (it seems to prefer classic rock,) but hey, it worked.
Nobody told me to leave at that point so we did Come As You Are by Nirvana, making this my only guitar solo of the evening. I need to make up my mind which 'voice' I'm going to use when I sing this; do I go with the safe low version which I know I can do? Or do I do the higher version which cuts through better but I can only do if I'm up for it? I actually did the one that I shouldn't have done, which was a mixture of the two and therefore lacked consistency. Also because I was playing it in standard tuning it threw Matt, who is used to playing it in D.
All in all, not one of my better ones, and I'll need to give it some serious thought before I play this one again. But it's all learning experience and Pete really wants to play drums with me on my own stuff. It's something I'll keep in mind but with anything up to 4 bands at the moment, this isn't looking likely right now.
I decided to go down The Maverick again and was pleasantly surprised to see Andy Fisher from Wordsley School down there; a really great guy who runs a terrific music department at his school. I also came across Pete who'd played drums with me before, so after recruiting Matt once again on bass and dashing off to my car to get my Strat, we began...
To be honest this suffered from the electric guitar. I guess when I'm playing my own stuff on my acoustic I take it for granted the dynamic range of the instrument, e.g. if you play soft you get a soft sound and if you play hard you get a more aggressive sound, whereas with the electric it basically depends on how the amp is set up and how loud it is, which for Get Out Of My Head was far too loud. Also, because the amp I was plugged in to was on the opposite side of the stage to the bass player, that made it almost impossible for Matt to see what I was doing, so he was finding it hard to follow my chords. They did their best, fair play to them, but by comparison I think it sounded a lot more messy than it did when I did the same thing with the acoustic guitar a few weeks past. Bitterness didn't sound too good either for the same reason, though at least the electric guitar was the sound I had in mind for it when I first wrote the song. The sound of the guitar was far too bright but as I was borrowing an amp, I shouldn't complain.
I didn't want to play Prisoner Of My Mind again after the last time (if you missed that blog, VERY broadly, the band liked it, the audience not so much.) and I was at a loss to which other of my own songs to play. We Will Survive would probably fit the bill but I need a guitar player capable of playing the DragonForce style pyrotechnics I'm planning for that one! So I decided to switch to covers. After establishing that none of the band knew Walkin' On The Sun, I elected to run with Local Boy In The Photograph, since we'd been talking about Stereophonics earlier and it's easy enough to follow the chords. This went fairly well and was probably the best song we played on the night, not necessarily the right venue (it seems to prefer classic rock,) but hey, it worked.
Nobody told me to leave at that point so we did Come As You Are by Nirvana, making this my only guitar solo of the evening. I need to make up my mind which 'voice' I'm going to use when I sing this; do I go with the safe low version which I know I can do? Or do I do the higher version which cuts through better but I can only do if I'm up for it? I actually did the one that I shouldn't have done, which was a mixture of the two and therefore lacked consistency. Also because I was playing it in standard tuning it threw Matt, who is used to playing it in D.
All in all, not one of my better ones, and I'll need to give it some serious thought before I play this one again. But it's all learning experience and Pete really wants to play drums with me on my own stuff. It's something I'll keep in mind but with anything up to 4 bands at the moment, this isn't looking likely right now.
Wednesday 1 June 2011
28/5/2011: Katiesfest
For how many times I've played Katies so far, it's nice I think that I can find something different to say about it each time, and each time find new and more adventurous ways to make the gig interesting. In this case, not only did I play in the Marquee, but for the second time I also brought on a guest...
The plan was to do a regular set, no surprises, no going out on a limb, because it was a festival setting and I got the feeling from it that the stakes were higher and I really didn't need to be screwing it up. I needn't have worried because the mid-afternoon turnout was modest, nobody other than the staff had seen me play before and whatever happened was all going to happen for the first time for those guys anyway. Nonetheless I stuck to the plan and kicked off with Bitterness followed by Get Out Of My Head, preceding the latter with a statement that those who had seen me before (by then Stefan had turned up,) wouldn't be surprised by this at all. It's nice that Stefan recognised it was me on hiw way in because I was playing Bitterness!
Next I played Let's Start A Band once again. I wanted to put a cover in there simply because I didn't think it was the right environment to play Prisoner Of My Mind, and to be fair it went quite well! The song's not familiar enough to me yet for me to be 'going through the motions' while I'm playing it, in fact I don't think I've ever actually practiced it at home, but I seemed to play it OK and it's the kind of song that I would expect would go down well at Katies. It's good to be right about that sort of thing.
Then for lack of a better option I played Believe. Not really the right atmosphere for this song either, considering what had gone on before and after I played, I could forgive the audience for thinking I'm taking myself a bit too seriously with this one. Me? Well, I've been playing that song since 2006. It has superceded the many many MANY songs I've written since then and quite a lot of the much smaller number of songs that I've road-tested and don't play live anymore. So quite frankly I don't care if anyone else likes it. I just need to be a bit more careful with it's deployment...
And now for my guest... How this came about was Daniel Mohr - who I'd seen play at Katies a couple of times before and know by sight though up until now had never spoken to him beyond the rudimentary 'Good set, mate' thing you do on open nights - came and sat with with me and asked me to play lead on a couple of his songs. I did this, and it went pretty well considering I'd never played with the guy before. I felt obliged to ask him to play on one of my songs in return, and was then left with the task of choosing which of my songs needed lead guitar. None of them, really... but there was that tin whistle part in Storm from the North. So I asked him to put some lead in to that. How did he get on? Well, on the gig, I honestly don't know. There was no foldback and I could barely hear what he was playing. However we had a quick run through before either of us went on and I know the sort of thing he was likely to have played, he wouldn't have gone wrong. He's got a melodic awareness resemblant of Mark Knopfler (except he uses a plectrum,) and to be perfectly honest any guitarist would thank you for saying something like 'Noodle around E Minor.' So, I gave him appropriate congratulations and I look forward to working with him again, if it ever comes up.
This being Katies I also feel obliged to turn around and play Girl's Names. It's been a while since I played this one and I remember fluffing a chord at some point but other than that it went as well as it ever does. It's funny how this is usually the song I say the least about...
I finished with We Will Survive, my staple 'ending' song. Not really much to say about this one either so instead I'll talk about the position of my leg, which has been giving me some food for thought over my last few gigs. Usually when you play a steel-strung guitar sitting down you have both legs out in front of you and balance your guitar on your right leg (if you're right-handed, of course.) I balance my guitar on my right leg as usual... and then for some reason stick my left leg out behind me as though I'm running. I don't really know why this is but I would imagine it would have something to do with the fact that I'd rather be moving around a lot more than my lakc of a guitar strap allows.
All in all not a bad gig, I enjoyed it. The highlight was the guest spot, definitely. Time to road test some new songs, I think...
The plan was to do a regular set, no surprises, no going out on a limb, because it was a festival setting and I got the feeling from it that the stakes were higher and I really didn't need to be screwing it up. I needn't have worried because the mid-afternoon turnout was modest, nobody other than the staff had seen me play before and whatever happened was all going to happen for the first time for those guys anyway. Nonetheless I stuck to the plan and kicked off with Bitterness followed by Get Out Of My Head, preceding the latter with a statement that those who had seen me before (by then Stefan had turned up,) wouldn't be surprised by this at all. It's nice that Stefan recognised it was me on hiw way in because I was playing Bitterness!
Next I played Let's Start A Band once again. I wanted to put a cover in there simply because I didn't think it was the right environment to play Prisoner Of My Mind, and to be fair it went quite well! The song's not familiar enough to me yet for me to be 'going through the motions' while I'm playing it, in fact I don't think I've ever actually practiced it at home, but I seemed to play it OK and it's the kind of song that I would expect would go down well at Katies. It's good to be right about that sort of thing.
Then for lack of a better option I played Believe. Not really the right atmosphere for this song either, considering what had gone on before and after I played, I could forgive the audience for thinking I'm taking myself a bit too seriously with this one. Me? Well, I've been playing that song since 2006. It has superceded the many many MANY songs I've written since then and quite a lot of the much smaller number of songs that I've road-tested and don't play live anymore. So quite frankly I don't care if anyone else likes it. I just need to be a bit more careful with it's deployment...
And now for my guest... How this came about was Daniel Mohr - who I'd seen play at Katies a couple of times before and know by sight though up until now had never spoken to him beyond the rudimentary 'Good set, mate' thing you do on open nights - came and sat with with me and asked me to play lead on a couple of his songs. I did this, and it went pretty well considering I'd never played with the guy before. I felt obliged to ask him to play on one of my songs in return, and was then left with the task of choosing which of my songs needed lead guitar. None of them, really... but there was that tin whistle part in Storm from the North. So I asked him to put some lead in to that. How did he get on? Well, on the gig, I honestly don't know. There was no foldback and I could barely hear what he was playing. However we had a quick run through before either of us went on and I know the sort of thing he was likely to have played, he wouldn't have gone wrong. He's got a melodic awareness resemblant of Mark Knopfler (except he uses a plectrum,) and to be perfectly honest any guitarist would thank you for saying something like 'Noodle around E Minor.' So, I gave him appropriate congratulations and I look forward to working with him again, if it ever comes up.
This being Katies I also feel obliged to turn around and play Girl's Names. It's been a while since I played this one and I remember fluffing a chord at some point but other than that it went as well as it ever does. It's funny how this is usually the song I say the least about...
I finished with We Will Survive, my staple 'ending' song. Not really much to say about this one either so instead I'll talk about the position of my leg, which has been giving me some food for thought over my last few gigs. Usually when you play a steel-strung guitar sitting down you have both legs out in front of you and balance your guitar on your right leg (if you're right-handed, of course.) I balance my guitar on my right leg as usual... and then for some reason stick my left leg out behind me as though I'm running. I don't really know why this is but I would imagine it would have something to do with the fact that I'd rather be moving around a lot more than my lakc of a guitar strap allows.
All in all not a bad gig, I enjoyed it. The highlight was the guest spot, definitely. Time to road test some new songs, I think...
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