Blog: Dress Rehearsal In The Village Hall

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I'm off to Woodhouse Eaves tonight for the DRESS REHEARSAL for our Christmas Gig, and i go with a headful of Musical Thoughts. These have been partly brought about by listening to a tape of our last practice, and thinking "Ooh, we're quite good aren't we?", but ALSO by watching Howard Goodall ANALYSING The Beatles at the weekend.

Mostly it was DEAD GOOD, as I spent most of it going "Exactly, the Beatles DID completely invent every genre of music since and WERE the most important band ever, you are CORRECT to say so Howard", and i ESPECIALLY enjoyed the bit where he went through all FIVE major, radical, brand new ideas contained in "Tomorrow Never Knows", as it sounded like EXACTLY the sort of thing i used to say when I used to get involved with these sort of arguments in the pub - nowadays i try and AVOID getting involved with "are the Beatles over-rated?" "discussion" in the same way i try to avoid "aah, but if you don't eat meat, why do you wear shoes?" type "discussions" because they usually end with EITHER me getting upset and annoyed OR me upsetting and annoying someone else and, frankly my dear, it is rarely worth the bother.

ANYWAY it was GRATE, even when he tried to illustrate his point about a song by singing it HIMSELF, and suddenly it was MUSIC CLASS at school with an over-earnest teacher singing Pop Songs in a reedy Church Voice and making it VERY DIFFICULT not to GIGGLE. The thing that really got me though was when he started talking about COMPOSITION, specifically about CHORDS. "A poor composer", he said, "will just take the easiest most obvious chords, the first ones he finds. A good composer however will track down the ones that serve the song the best."

My dears it was almost as if he had leant out of the telly and WAGGED a REPRIMANDING FINGER at me - am i GUILTY of this apparently heinous sin? SUDDENLY i was back in the rehearsal room with Tom saying "the chords don't change much, so it's difficult to find a violin line", or Rob saying "oh me oh my, what CAN the chords be do let me guess is it C and G by any chance?" (NB Sarcasm)... Have i done all i can to make my COMPOSITIONS of INTEREST? Have i worked hard, played well, been kind to the younger ticks and treated the skool dog with respekt ect ect ect???

I don't know - on the one hand, sod it, there's enough going on OUTSIDE the guitar chords, especially with BAND in action, on the other, well, perhaps using Cdim32aug6// instead of C for a change might PEP things up a bit? We can only try it out and see - i shall report back from the CHORD FRONTLINE anon, if you don't hear from me again you will know i have MANGLED my fingers in the cause of RESEARCH!

posted 29/11/2004 by MJ Hibbett

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