Hello everybody!
It happened! Our very first lunchtime concert of the Improvisation and Collaboration course just took place on 5th of December and it was a great experience for me and definitely for my band.
This performance was the first time when I played with new people: Thomas (guitar), Roseanne (bass), Mariana (keyboard), Natalie (drums), and this concert turned out to be more complicated than I expected.
First of all, after we created the band, while we had the first rehearsal we decided to create a chord progression and improvise one-by-one on it. We composed just the melodic line, which was in C major. The song started with the drums and with my guitar. After just a few bars, the tempo was changed into a faster one, and step by step all the instruments joined the song. The rhythm was a stable one: 4/4, the only thing that changed was the tempo.
Talking about the song genre, well, here is a long story! All the members are playing in a different style. Everyone has a different one in this band, except me and Thomas, we are playing rock/metal stuff. But this was a good thing because we tried to combine the styles and to create something new. I strongly believe that our improvisation from that day is a piece which is based on different influences, brought by our members.
As you can see in the video that I am going to attach below, because I usually play fast things, I used some alternate picking, sweep picking and my idea on that moment was to create a melodic line in E Minor Hamonic (or Aeolian #7) on the top of the one in C Major. The theory that the beginning of my improvisation is based on is regarding the mods. E is the third note in C Major which means that I was playing a Phyrigian mode, but with a augmented second between 6th and 7th degrees and with #F.
In my opinion, the concert wasn’t bad, but for sure we can improve things for the next one. We are thinking about having some “clues” when we should start improvising or when we are about to do big changes during the song.
To sum up, I loved our first group performance. We learnt a lot of things about playing and improvising in a band and also we gained experience when it comes to perform live.
You can have a look on YouTube to enjoy the concert: Click here!
Hope you will like it, stay tuned!
Emilian Costin 