This week Tom and I decided to perform the song ‘Bellyache’ by Billie Eilish. The original has elements of percussion and electronic sounds, but we stripped it back to just vocals, bass, and piano.

Sam and Toby introduced me to the idea of inverting the chords to make the song sound less boring and to fill it out a bit. However, once we rehearsed with the inversions Tom and I preferred it the way it first was.

I think I definitely could have had more vocal control towards the ending of the performance but it was the first time I had performed solo accompanied by the piano, so i was very nervous. Tom has come really far with the bass, now he can pick it up and learn quickly.

In the MIDI lessons we’re composing our own tracks in a specific genre, I’ve chosen to do alternative because there are no strict rules as to what you can/cannot do with a song in that genre.

With the Christmas gig approaching, we had to choose the songs that the groups are going to perform and the arrange the setlist. The songs that we’re doing, in order, are:

Laura’s group – Seven Nation Army

Zoe and Megan – Stitches

Laura’s Group, Sara and Bow – Havanna

Bow and Sara – Location

Zoe and Megan – Silent scream

Laura’s group – Stole the show

Isobel and Kai – Royals

(Group names are based on the singers in the group.)

We got told that we were only supposed to do one song each. But apparently that is not the case, for as you can see there is one group doing three songs and others doing two. The setlist will probably change because Laura’s group wants to perform ‘Stole the show’ last.

In MIDI this week I played about with the EQ on a Hendrix song. Most of the students took out the “oo’s” and “ah’s” because they were awkward, I’m among the people that did this.

This week we chose the song Valerie by Amy Winehouse. We picked this song because it is more upbeat, in contrast to Make you feel my love by Adele which we performed the previous week. As this song was our strongest, we decided to perform it for the induction task.

The audio on the video turned out strange so the vocals sounds much lower than they actually are which is pretty annoying.

Some of the positive feedback was: the band and vocalists stayed in time nicely, the bassist was very good considering the fact that he had only picked up a bass guitar two days beforehand, and the vocalists were a hell of a lot more confident compared to their previous performance.

Some constructive criticism was: for one of the vocalists to sing louder as there is an imbalance in the vocalist’s volumes, and to add some harmonies to lift the song.

The other groups performed Seven Nation Army, Stitches, Havana, Hotel California, and Stand By Me. All of which were great performances and received a lot of positive feedback.