Rory's Professional Project: The History Of Blues Rock

October

In my project I decided to do a performance for my degree Professional project module. The performance is going to be a performance of Blues Rock songs that have influenced me as a musician. The show would be marketed as a history of blues rock. My plan was to pick one song from every decade starting in the 60’s going to present day to achieve the history of blues rock title. The songs were chosen by me as they are songs that have heavily inspired me throughout my career as a musician. At this time, I choose that it would be beneficial to keep the guitar solos the same as the original so then it would be a true history of blues rock.

November

In this month I created a poster to market the project it is attached above. I wanted people to come see the gig for the love of the music and also to see us in particular. More importantly, I got my band together I decided to do a trio as many of the Blues Rock acts that I love were trios. I selected my members due to playing with them in my other band Attic Days so I knew they were reliable and could do the parts justice.

December

In December I realised that the sound of my project wasn’t as full as I hoped especially in the mid-range. I fixed this by hiring another musician for my band. My good friend and bandmate Dylan offered to sing backing vocals and play bass. This meant that my current bass player moved to rhythm guitar and lead vocals. This improved the issue we had with the sound not sounding as full particularly when I solo, as there was no rhythm guitar being played then. The backing vocals also helped recreate the sounds of the songs. I felt like this was the best choice for my performance as not only the overall band sounded better but we also had more people potentially wanting to come see us play, as people who are know Dylan might want to come see him selling more tickets.

January

Continuing with the practice we started to experiment with the solos, I liked playing the original solos but started doing more and more research into improvisation I felt like I would benefit from writing and playing my own solos. This decision meant I would write my own solos using the original solos as a starting point then continuing to develop new musical ideas I have been researching throughout this month. I always checked with my supervisor to make sure my solos stayed at the same level of difficulty and he guided me down different avenues musically and technically. This gives me more scope to improve my playing and musicianship throughout the project and will hopefully benefit me in professional setting.

February

In this month I decided that one of the songs needed changing. The song Going Down by Freddie King was supposed to originally be in the set. I changed this song for Worried Dreams by Fleetwood Mac. I changed it due to Going Down needing a piano part that we felt we could try recreate with guitars but it did not have the same effect, we tried many different ways of playing the part, many different guitars and many different effects but had the same effect the piano did in the original. The new song is still in the same blues rock genre, at similar difficulty level and in the right decade for my marketing.