Jesus of suburbia: Vocals - supporting vocals with diaphragm, breath control 28/09/16

In today's practice, I was working on the vocals for this song. I had a vocal run through of the song from start to finish just to get a feel of the pitch, dynamics and general tone of the vocals and so I know what to work on. In terms of pitch, it generally isn't too challenging however at points it does jump quite high. I feel I need to work on these points because when it does go high, my voice sounds quite weak and I feel the strain within my vocal chords. To work on this, I really practiced tensing and squeezing my diaphragm to really push the sound out from my stomach/diaphragm area rather than my throat. Once I practiced it this way, I found that my voice sounded a lot stronger and supported, and I was able to hit the higher pitched notes easier - however I still need to work on/practice this technique because it very hard to get the hang of, and sometimes I don't realise I am singing from my throat. Another aspect I focused on was my breath control; at some points in the song, there are long lines of lyrics with no breathing time, and a few long held notes. I think I covered this quite well as I have had previous practice of breath control and I feel quite confident in holding long notes and controlling my breathing. To practice this, I did a breath control exercise called 'bowman on horse back'. This is where you breathe in as much as possible and hold it, then do a movement, then breathe back out forcefully and quickly from your stomach, making a loud 'boom' sound as you do. This helps to increase your oxygen capacity in your stomach per inhale. I did this a few times to just warm up my diaphragm and practice breath control, then when I applied the technique to the song, I took deep breathes from my stomach and up through my chest - inhaling as much oxygen as possible - before I start to sing so that I can easily hold long notes and/or take less quick grasp of air throughout the song so that the vocals have more flow to them. For my next vocal practice, I need to work on my diction and articulation as sometimes I tend to slur my words when singing. I am also going to focus on the dynamics of my voice, looking at when to increase and decrease my volume depending on the lyrics, dynamics of the music, or whether the music is soft or heavy.

All along the watchtower reheasal log 17/09/16

Today I started to learn my second song choice, All along the watchtower by Jimi Hendrix; this song is a lot more complicated than Jesus of suburbia so I started straight away with the tab notation sheet music. Today I just worked on the opening chord riff, then the first lead solo. The opening riff is very easy, just 3 chords, 2 of which are major and 1 is minor. The lead part however, is rather challenging because it is heavily dominated by tone bends, so it is hard to make sure I bend them to the correct pitch, most of the bends are whole step bends. There are a couple of hammer ons and pull offs which are normally easy but because in this song they are done quite fast, it took me a while to get but eventually I got it. I just kept practicing it slowly in small chunks instead of all together and at the original tempo, and once I got it all, I practiced it all together repeatedly, increasing the tempo each time.

Jesus of Suburbia: Guitar - learning the song 16/09/16

Today I started to learn my first song choice, Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day. I know this song very well (not on guitar) so it shouldn't very hard to learn when it comes to reading the notations.To start with, I listened to the song a few times and learnt the key is in G#m, and from there I learnt chords to the first few sub-songs (the song is a 10 minute track full of 5 'sub-songs'; this I will use this to my advantage when it comes to future rehearsals because I can set myself the goal of learning one sub song each rehearsal). I learnt these chords just by ear just to get the basics down, however next rehearsal I will have the tab notation so I can lean it properly with each technique. I didn't really use any techniques in this rehearsal, because I just learnt the basic chords by ear.