Unit 9: Rehearsal Diaries/songwritting

 First Rehearsal session 15/09/25

For our first rehearsal session, we were given a challenge to write a song with a structure that was picked out randomly from a cup. This challenge was given to everyone to try to experiment with different structures to what we'd normally use and to help us write a song in a different way than what we'd normally do.

The structure we were given was Intro, verse, chorus, interlude, verse, chorus, extended outro

Here is a clip of us performing that song

For our first rehearsal session, we were given an assignment to rehearse and write three songs in order to create a cd. We were given around 3 weeks to rehearse and write the songs. We eventually wrote three songs, one being called "When the time is right", another one called "Save the world", and the last one called "out of the cold".

"Save the world" was originally in the key of D but it didn't suit or singer's vocal range, so we changed it to be in the key of C since that's what the singer was more comfortable with in the end.

Here are all of the chord progression's for the three songs:

Save the world

intro - |C///|  |Bb///|  |F///|

Verse - |C///|  |Bb///|  |F///|

pre chorus - |Gm///|  |Bb///|  |C///| x3  |Gm///|  |Bb///|  |G///|

Chorus -  |C///| |E///| |F///| |G///| x4 |Bb///| |G///|

Structure for save the world (intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, chorus)

When the time is right

Intro - |Am///| G///| F///| x2

Verse - |A///| G///| F///| x8

Chorus - |C///| G///| F///| x4

Guitar solo- |C///| G///| F///| x4

Structure for when the time is right (Intro, verse, chorus, guitar solo, verse, chorus)

Out of the cold

|E///| Fm9/11///| E maj7///|

|D///| A///| E///|

|Fm///| B///|

|E///| Fm9/11| E maj7///| A///|

When the time is right

During rehearsal, jack (the guitarist) was the one who came up with the chord progression which was just AM/G/F, and keeping the chorus pretty simple with just C/G/F. We all also discussed it was best to only have one guitarist playing as we thought 2 would clash too much, the song would also have bass and drums. After playing the song all the way through, we thought it lacked "excitement", therefore we added a 4 bar solo that Jack wrote, which comes in after the second chorus which then leads straight back into the second verse. We liked how simple and laid back this song was before, but after adding the guitar solo, we liked how brighter and fuller the song felt.

When recording "When the time is right", we started with Jack recording a guitar track as a guide for drums and vocals to record.

We then recorded everything in the order of vocals, drums, bass and guitar. But unfortunately after recording everything perfectly the first time, we had forgotten to press save throughout the session, which resulted in the whole track being deleted.

After this, we came into the studio the next day and acknowledged our mistake and made sure to save everything. We recorded the track in the exact same way as the previous session, and even added some piano which i later deleted from my mix since it was recorded very out of time to the rest of the instruments and i also personally didn't like how the piano sounded with the rest of the instruments. We also had some backing vocals in the last chorus from two other students in our class.

In this image, Jack is recording the guitar demo for the song.

For the drums we used a total of 8 microphones. We used five Sm-57 mics, one kick drum mic and two overhead mics. We used a microphone under the snare for the first time but for some reason the sound didn't come through on the track, therefore we did some research on how to set it up correctly in order to use it for the next two tracks.

The process of recording this song started with Jack (the guitarist) recording rhythm guitar into the direct interface of the mac to use as a demo track. We then went straight to recording the vocals, then the drums and lastly the bass. Towards the last recording session, we got the idea to have piano throughout the song and have vocal harmonies in the last chorus in order to make the song more interesting and different to our other songs.

"Out of the cold"

This song surprisingly didn't take long to create. It took us two rehearsal days to write the melody, chords and drum part, and it took Dave a week to write the lyrics and Jack a week to write the solo and lead guitar parts of the song as we performed this at the college Christmas gig. The song was influenced massively by the song we created in September as a challenge to experiment with different structures.

The recording process started with us finding out the bpm of the song which was 95bpm. After this we began looking through the structure of the song from previous rehearsal sessions that we had recorded, and wrote down the structure down on notes.

Jack then attempted to record the rhythm guitar directly into the track and for some reason it wouldn't record. To fix this I mentioned that I remembered the song pretty well, therefore I recorded without a demo. This ended up being a success. After this we managed to get the rhythm guitar working. After finally recording the demo, we realised my drum track was missing a few parts, therefore I had to re-record using the rhythm guitar as a demo.

While recording drums, we realised the right overhead microphone wasn't working and this caused a lot of confusion. We trouble shooted it straight away and found that there was no issue with the cable or microphone itself. Once we got it working, we changed the input from 5-10 and it did nothing so then we rechecked the gain levels and they we're set fine. After all of this we had no choice but to get one of the tutors to help us out, and turns out the output box on the wall was sending cables to the wrong input on the interface. Unfortunately we ended up losing 2 hours due to this issue which left us a bit behind on where we wanted to be and only had the rhythm guitar recorded.

Luckily the following day we managed to record drums and vocals and guitar all in an hour and a half. We learnt from yesterday's issue that we should've started the recording process a lot earlier therefore if we had run into an issue, time wouldn't have mattered as much as it did this week.

We used 8 microphones on the drum kit again as we all agreed it captured everything that we wanted. We used microphones on each of the toms, two overheads, one on top of the snare and one below on the under snare, we also used a kick microphone.

To mic the guitar, Jack wanted a warm sound, therefore we used one Sm-57 which was placed on the side of the speaker and was only recorded one track at a time.

To record the vocals we used a condenser microphone like in all of our previous tracks.

Bass was recorded through the DI on the next day.

"Save the world"

This song was created in the span of a week and it was influenced by one of our older songs called "Move a Mountain", Jack created the chords and i started playing a beat quite similar to move a mountain, and Dave wrote the lyrics not long after the song was created.

The recording process began in the exact same way that out of the cold was recorded. We managed to record everything in one day.

We followed the same microphone technique by using 8 mics on the drums, a condenser mic on the vocals, and the bass and rhythm guitar plugged into the interface.

This was the guitar setup used on all three recordings.