Monthly Roundup #2 - April '18

Here we are, once again! April is where it's all started kicking off for me, at the start of what's set to be a very busy few months. The busyness has run into May as well, which is why this instalment has been a bit delayed! But having finally found the chance to sit down and mull over my April antics (in an Essex service station!), here we go!

For the first week of April I had Spring Harvest, for which I was playing at the Harrogate venue. Spring Harvest is a Christian conference, where the band is required to play in the morning and evening meetings. That results in us having a fair bit of free time during the day, so there was plenty of sitting around drinking coffee and exploring Harrogate and the surrounding area - which was nice! Production and playing-wise, it's a fairly big event and a lot of it involved playing to clicks and tracks, but at the same time there's space for some spontaneity, so it's a nice mixture. Also, the venue had some serious acoustic treatment going on, to the extent that without front of house up, the band almost disappeared (in the words of the FOH engineer) - result being, it was an opportunity to let loose and do some heavy hitting, which made a pleasant change to my usual scenarios where I have to keep a lid on it! Overall, it was a really fun week with a great group of mates!

With the Spring Harvest rig, having collared my mate to get a picture of me and my drums!

The next week (which was the second week of the Easter holidays, so no teaching) was relatively quiet, so provided a nice opportunity to spend some time with friends and family after the week away, but still there was a nice jazz gig (trio plus singer) on the Wednesday night, and a hotel function on the Saturday night. The jazz gig was the first of what's set to be a regular, monthly jazz club in Eastbourne, so that would be a nice thing to have on the doorstep!

Wednesday night's jazz gig - amazing job fitting a trio on the smallest stage in the world!

The following week, the schools were back in action so the teaching resumed, and there were a couple of bookings working towards an original project I'm involved with. We had a rehearsal on the Thursday night, then a photoshoot for the promo material on the Saturday morning, which was a bit of fun - especially as I have an uncanny ability to look like a muppet in any posed picture... I then also had my lesson with Andrew on the Friday morning, so that left me with plenty more stuff to be working on!

Enjoying this nice and simple, straight forward setup for the original project on the go at the moment.

The last week of April included some more teaching, a rehearsal for a couple of gigs in May and June, another hotel function, then the band call for a show running the first week of May. The rehearsal was with the same guys from the Spring Harvest week but for a couple of different gigs - one, another Christian event coming up in May (where we'll be playing some similar material to what we did at Spring Harvest), and the other for a gig in June where we will be playing some of Pete's (the singer/songwriter) original music which we recorded back in January 2017 (the album being Throwback Kid, Flowing With The Feeling) with the same personnel on board. It was the first time we had all been together to play through the songs from the record since we recorded them, so it was fun to revisit them and it'll be great to gig the material - if you're interested, on the "Media" page of my website you'll find the music video for one of the songs, "Bluebells & Blossom".

The Saturday night function was with a band I play with regularly, but this time around I thought I'd give myself a new challenge and not rely on the click to count in the tunes, which I normally do just to be sure I start the 60-odd songs off at the right tempo. So, I thought it'd be a good challenge for me to count the songs in from memory rather than referencing the metronome. I did mention this to the band beforehand, letting them know that if a song feels a bit too up/down to give me a glare, but actually it all went pretty well and it was quite liberating to do it "the old fashioned way"! It was also nice to be free to read the room a bit more, and give things a bit of a nudge in one way or the other depending on the vibe.

Finally, I had the band call on the Sunday for the show which ran through the first week of May (but as this is the April update, I'll pretend I haven't already done the show!). Where this show was a mixture of songs from different musicals, we didn't have one particular score we were reading from, but instead a variety from different tunes from different shows - I didn't envy the MD having to source all the different parts for the 10-strong band (if I remember correctly!), and so this particular band call was mainly about ensuring all our parts matched, and were the same arrangements that the cast had been learning. Plenty of annotations to do, which left me with a fun evening of taping pages together, marking cuts, and highlighting repeats/codas etc - living the dream! 

Band call for the show running the first week of May. Pencil at the ready!

As I'm sure you see from this post, April has been full of variety - playing in conference centres, hotels, theatres and bars, playing pop, rock, jazz, and musical theatre (which of course encompasses a huge mix of genres). It's that variety that I enjoy the most, and it certainly keeps me on my toes! If you checked out my previous blog post about my different kits and the roles they serve, you may have also noticed that each kit had it's own place this month from the pictures, so it's a good example of that too. May is set to be a busy one too, so I'll look forward to giving you an update on that once everything has settled down a bit! Thanks as always for taking the time to read about my drumming antics. Until next time, all the best! Ed.