Solsbury Hill

"Solsbury Hill" is a song by British musician Peter Gabriel, about a spiritual experience atop Solsbury Hill in Somerset, England. Gabriel wrote the song after his departure from the progressive rock band Genesis, of which he had been the lead singer since its inception, explaining the reasons behind his departure. Despite the eloquence and purity of the vision atop Solsbury Hill, there may be some ambivalence of being free or going solo: "And liberty she pirouette when I think that I am free." It was his debut single. The single was a Top 20 hit in the UK and reached the Top 70 on the Billboard Hot 100.

It has been used in a number of movies, for example in the soundtracks of the 2001 film Vanilla Sky, and the 2004 film In Good Company. The song has been covered by many artists, including moe,. Dave Matthews, Erasure, Sarah McLachlan, Saga, and Justin Hines, among others.

The song uses a 7/4 time signature for the vast majority of the song. The last two measures of each chorus are in 4/4.

Lonesome Day

"Lonesome Day" is a song written by Bruce Springsteen and initially performed by Springsteen and the E Street Band. It was the opening track of his 2002 album The Rising It was released as a single as the follow-up to the title track on December 2, 2002 and reached #36 on the Billboard Adult Top 40 chart, #39 in the UK, and #47 in Sweden.

Where's My Mind?

"Where Is My Mind?" is a song by the American Alternative Rock band Pixies. It is the seventh track on their 1988 album Surfer Rosa. The song was written by frontman Black Francis while he attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, inspired by his experiences scuba diving in the Caribbean. He later said he had "this very small fish trying to chase me. I don't know why — I don't know too much about fish behavior."

Home for the hols

This week i helped out Amy Rayner in the studio for her E.P that she's going to be bringing out when we eventually go on a mini tour around Fife and other places in Scotland. I'll hopefully use the recordings in my graded unit if i get a hold of them in time but if not, here's a cheeky picture to show that i'm not lying out my..... And hopefully we'll be back in the studio soon to finish off the rest of her songs and then get on the road and start spreading the love. I miss playing live and i'm hopping in the future that i'll get to do it more often with my outside college band. So far i have 3(ish) bands, and i think i'm going to have to be quite selfish if i see more potential or more movement and development in one band. If that happens, i'll put 100% commitment into that one band and leave the other 2. Selfish i know, but i feel i have to be if i want to get where i want to be band wise.

Also in this week i started my 2nd study piano lesson which so far wasn't that great because it was just sitting around talking about what we wanted to learn. It makes sense that we did that but i would've liked to at least play a few notes and find out really what i knew and what i wanted to get out of the class. But i guess we'll see why happens after the Easter Holidays.

Speaking of Easter Holidays. I've still got to figure out what i'm going to write about in my band class. We've been given the task to write a song about something that's happening in the World now or something that happened in the past. So the one thing that's in my head is WW2 or to be more specific, D Day, Don't ask me why because i don't exactly know myself but hopefully i'll get a flash of inspiration sometime in the holidays and write something worthy enough.

Penultimate blog!

So these past couple weeks have been going well graded unit wise. I've filmed and uploaded to youtube and added videos to my graded unit iWeb page and it's actually looking really good. Still got a lot to do though but it's coming together nicely!

Drumwise, Ronnie said i'm doing really well and progressing a lot and should be almost 100% on at least 3 of my 4 pieces by the time i need to play them for assessment. I'm still practising where i can and working on my double strokes and finger work. I'm getting a lot quicker as i watch all the videos i've filmed through the month.

Just one session left to do in session skills and i'll hand in my 3 short evaluations to Gav once they're done. Then i'll focus most of my time in creating my power point for my interview and finishing off my iWeb page.

Oh yeah, and i got an A in my theory exam! Awesome!!

you can see a million miles tonight

Uploaded 2 videos onto my recently made YouTube page to then copy onto my iWeb page for graded unit and i will be videoing a lot more of myself doing warm ups, sight-reading and session work. Right now on my web page i've made a page for everything that's needed from the job spec and all i have to do is fill everything in on its respective page.

Started practising with Amy Rayner since she asked me to drum for her band this easter. So far we've got 4 songs down and i hope to learn more. i'm wanting to involve this with my graded unit because it shows how easy i am when working with others and adapting to a genre that i would normally not listen to. I think it's going well and the rest of the band seem happy with what we've come up with. All we need now are the dates of when we'll be playing live for people.

As for my band outside of college 'The Amazing Everyday', i had to step up yet again and sort everyone out since Nick didn't quite like the direction and sound we were making as a band so i decided to talk to him and find out what he wants and luckily we managed to arrange another practice and wrote one new song that is quite different to what we wrote before but none the less, everyone seemed to like the stuff so fingers crossed it goes well from here and we get to gigging sometime soon.

For next week, i'll let you all know how well the gig went with my band work band at Fat Sam's and hopefully will come up with some pictures and/or videos so i'll be able to have some sort of evidence for this blog and my graded unit web page. But that's next week....

Monday i took control in our band work session when we had to choose a song and teach the band so that we could play it for our Fat Sam's gig in march. It didn't go as well as i'd hoped for since we only got half the song done but hopefully next week we'll have finished it and started another one or two so we can work on the performance of the gig on our last practice (the monday before the gig on Wednesday).

The rest of the week i didn't do much in the way of graded unit except make more videos but i'm yet to upload them to YouTube so i can put them on my website in DAW.

 On friday Paul had the drum kit out again for all of us to partake in a session type activity where, next week; we will have to play a song with the guitarists and bassists. The song was "cold sweat" and we all practiced it with and without reading the music! Since Paul isn't much of a session reader and can't really read drum music to a 'sight-reading' level. I found it better to work with the other drummers rather than sitting in a room looking at a piece of music and i managed to get the beat a lot quicker and easier by watching and listening rather than reading the music. I think that shows that i might need to work harder on my sight-reading but word from the pro's is that it's not exactly as important as i've been told.

Last week was pretty good in my progress for my graded unit.
We started our website class instead of DAW and it's coming along nicely! I've still got to write the report that mike gave us though (which i think is due next monday). Because of the website starting up i have started filming myself a lot more when warming up, sight-reading, and recording in the studio. I'll hopefully manage to acquire some audio tracks once the engineers have master them. But who knows how long that's going to take when i still haven't heard anything from the first piece we recorded!!

Outside of college, i've managed to get the band into the practice rooms instead of having an acoustic session in my flat! which, i'm very happy about because now we actually know what we want to sound like and are starting to write more songs and have actual goals for each practice rather than just set up, jam and finish. Hopefully we'll be gigging in the near future.

nothing much 4/2/12

So this week.. I can't really think of anything relevant that i did to follow up why i'd be a good session musician so this week coming i will attempt to do a lot more so that i will actually have something to talk about in my next blog.

Resolution DONE!

I don't really know what i've learned this week...... It's been  a while since my last blog and apologies for that but i'm going to start doing it more often. And to help with that i've decided to have my blog as my home page whenever i go on the internet.

  So with relevance to my job spec. i was asked to fill in for a drummer last wednesday in session skills to help the band record 'what becomes of a broken hearted' since they were drummer-less. Since i had already recorded the song with another band, it was still quite a challenge since i hadn't played it in a month, but it went well and we recorded the song 3 times and picked our best. I feel that it was partially sight reading since i had to refer back to the music a fair bit when playing and probably helped my ability to read music and play on demand and under pressure. However, because of this, i have grown to hate that song with a passion and i'm so glad it's over now and the class are focusing on other projects.

I managed to fulfil my new years resolution already by finally having a band practice with the band i'm setting up outside of college. It took me ages but we've finally found a day in the week where all of us are free to practice for a good 2-3 hours. Now on my to-do-list is to get a practice in one of the practice rooms in the college instead of acoustically in my flat. The tricky part is finding a day where we're all free again and the practice rooms happen to be empty!! Fingers crossed!!

I think that's all for this week..... If i think of anything else i'll probably put it in the next blog. But that's for another week.