Intro Practice Gig Reflection

This was meant to happen earlier this week, Monday afternoon but was rearranged due to timetable clashes. One of the other recording groups from my class was recording the Grand Piano in the venue, just like my recording group did the week before so we ended up just having a practice instead. Today was just as good.

We had about half an hour practice beforehand and managed to just about run though all of our setlist. We were playing four songs and out of all of the groups had the most songs ready to perform. I would like to say that this is obviously because I am in the band, but it's a team effort and we've all been working together perfectly over the last couple of months. We have a laugh every now and then where it's appropriate and we clearly all fully enjoy what we do. It will certainly be a shame if any of them weren't to progress up to the next level and further their studies and follow the educational path just as I did.

All in all, the gig went great for us. I was quite nervous, but tried my best to hide this because I didn't want my nervousness effect anyone else in the band. Our bassist, Emily told me she felt a bit uneasy about it and felt like she would have been more ready on Monday and all I could do really was reassure her and tell her it's good to have these nerves. This was my first in a long time (maybe two or three years) and the first time I had ever performed on a drum kit live. The sense of pressure really was real and heavily present, being a HND (level 4) student I had to make sure I shown that off a little too. Just not too much. I guess what I mean is despite the short time I've been playing, if I had played like shit I would have felt that I've really let my course down as a representative and I would have been furthermore disappointed in myself. My whole performance wasn't perfect and I did make a few little errors, but this is fine. This was just a practice gig and it's given me a chance to experience the buzz of playing live on stage all over again. I thought that I managed to stay in-time, which is the most important thing and feel like I played quite confidently.

The energy is incredible and is certainly different to that of a practice because everyone is much more focused, yet it's still fully functional to "vibe" of each other musically and is very much enjoyable. It's saddening that this almost brings our band's journey to it's end. We have our final gig for their assignment sometime in March and after that the bands will change around, but it nice to feel the transition of this all starting to feel complete and meet the end of it's full cycle as it all starts again.