Analysis of recordings during the year 




Funk-  "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay" - Otis Redding

This was a nice track to play, We had quite a big band for this track, this involving guitar (both acoustic and electric), bass, drums, piano, vocals and a horn section. I think my playing is quite solid throughout without too much fluctuation in time. We had put a lot of work into the structure of this track so I was quite confident in what I was playing. The whole idea this year in performance class was to get the tracks sounding as close to the original as possible and I think we managed it with this recording. I tried to have a very dynamic performance, although the track doesn't really leave much space for dynamics in my playing, that is really in the rest of the band and the overall texture of the track.  I think my job in this track was to really just keep a solid tempo and easy feel to the song, which I feel I did.


Jazz - "Take 5" - Carmen McRae

This version of Take 5 has quite a similar feel to the original take five, the only real difference is that it has vocals written for it. I tried to keep a similar idea to that which Joe Morello (the drummer for the original version of take five) played. I found playing in 5/8 relatively easy, although keeping the off beat timing on the Hi-hats was quite difficult. I used brushes for this performance as it sounded far too harsh with sticks, it seemed to sit much nicer in the texture of the full band with brushes.

I think the overall performance of the song went well, there was a bit of a slip up near the middle of the song where Jilly went out of time quite badly, this had been a recurring problem in rehearsal but on the whole, the performance of the song had come a long way from all of us from where it first started out. I think we managed to deal with the mistake quite well and recover from it quite quickly, I think that is one of those situations in a live setting where the audience would soon forget about a mistake which is well recovered from.
I can admit that I find Jazz much harder than my usual choice of genre to play, it is something that I have never really tried in great depth and is clearly something that you can't just "learn" in a matter of weeks or months. I have been working on it and I can see and feel its benefits working into my playing so in the long run I feel it will really benefit me.


I was involved in the rehearsal processes for other tracks during the year although I unfortunately missed the recording of the performances. Proof of this will be in a later posting with youtube videos from the tour showing my playing with The Birthday Suit.