Being a Musician in
Lockdown
By Nic Holson
I don’t know about everyone else, but I for one have felt like
I have developed so many skills during the past 3 months. Besides actually
being at home now for dinner and preparing meals, rather than grapping a sandwich
between guitar lessons, a host of other skills have been improved because of
new requirements due to the lockdown.
Now I know lockdown has affected everyone completely differently,
some worse than others, but I just thought it would be interesting to discuss
how my life as a musician has changed.
Week one began with the mad rush of moving all my guitar
lessons to online. How do you teach online? What software do you use? What
equipment will I need? What equipment will my students need? Quick bit of
researching online finding out what other instrumental teachers were using and
Zoom appeared to be the platform of choice. Little did I know at this stage was
that Zoom was going to become the place where I would spend most of my time for
foreseeable future.
Luckily, I made the decision the afternoon before the
lockdown announcement was made to head to my band and teaching space and
collect a bunch of equipment and instruments. I collected my main amp, my ESP
LTd Explorer, my Jim Deacon strat, my audio interface, a dynamic mic and condenser
mic, a mic stand, a bunch of xlr and jack cables and my clarinet and Mr Clyne’s
alto sax. The need for the last two items will be explained below.
Now that all the equipment that I needed was at home, it was
time to set up the space and then road test it all. Thankfully my good friend
Joe from Stay for Tomorrow was there to be my guinea pig.
Teaching over the internet brought a whole host of new challenges,
the main one being the slight time delay which makes playing together with a student
near impossible. However, I quickly got used to the setup and the best ways to
teach students online and I just want to say a huge thank you and well done to
all my students who adapted so quickly!
So, the clarinet and the saxophone I hear you ask about.
Well for the few months just before lockdown, The Passing Sages had been hard
at work putting together an EP with plans to release in May. However, like many
things, this has been delayed. The positive side to this has been more time to work
on and develop the songs and the arrangements. A few of the songs on the EP
have horn parts which had all been written and programmed in using MIDI and although
samples have improved leaps and bounds over the years, there is still nothing better
in my opinion than the real thing. At least for the type of music we are
producing. This is where the clarinet and sax come in. With this extra time to
work on the EP, I decided I was going push myself and learn the sax parts I had
written and record them on a real saxophone. I have played some saxophone before,
a little tenor sax in high school and back in 2018 I played the saxophone part
for “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses when we covered it for a Christmas
gig. Shout out to Moonlight Zoo’s Jamie Adamson who joined us on stage to play
guitar for that song!
Some of the tracks on
the EP use trumpet samples but sadly I don’t have access to a trumpet and have
also never played one before. I do though own a clarinet and played clarinet
all the way through high school so I decided to take the trumpet parts and
re-write them for clarinet so that it would work with the alto sax parts. Now for
those of you that understand transposition you will realise that I had to first
of all transpose all the midi parts that had technically been written on a
piano which is a C instrument into the correct keys for the alto sax (an Eb
instrument) and clarinet (a Bb instrument).
Once that was done, it was then a
case of learning how to actually play the parts. Now let’s bear in mind that I originally
wrote all these parts either from melodic ideas in my head, or by playing
things on the guitar. Therefor at no point was I thinking at all about the physicality
of playing these parts on a real sax or clarinet. Never mind some of the very
challenging fingerings, what is the main thing that a wind player needs to
think about that a guitarist doesn’t? Breathing!
This meant re-working some of the parts to allow the player
(me in this case) to breathe. Now although I played clarinet all the way
through high school, I haven’t played regularly for a long time, so my breath
control isn’t quite up there. So I actually had to take a fair amount of time
to re-develop this. I don’t want to give anything away about what songs are on the
EP, but I nearly passed out recording the end of one of them.
Recording the clarinet and sax parts for the song was a huge
learning experience, even if it was also very tiring and frustrating at times.
I apologise to my girlfriend and my neighbours for having to listen to the same
parts repeatedly, followed by expressions of pure…anguish from yours truly. It was
all worth it though because the tracks already sound so much better than they
did before...I say humbly.
Now lockdown has also brought us the exciting “Live From
Lockdown” sessions. For solo artists this is easy, make your backdrop look lovely,
find a way to balance your phone, head to your favourite social media platform
and hit “go live”. Sound quality almost isn’t even an issue as people expect it
not to be that great anyway. Oh, you may also need to practice and learn some
songs as well….yes I am being a touch facetious!
For bands it’s a whole different ball game. Instead what we have
needed to do is have everyone record and film their parts for a song, mix the
track all together and edit a video. This seems relatively straightforward on
paper but it in facts takes so much longer than people expect. What this has
done though has pushed me to not only develop my recording and mixing skills
but also to learn about using video editing software. Not content with putting up
something half baked that doesn’t represent the band well, this has seen many…many
hours be put in to learning editing techniques and tricks and thinking about
creative ways to showcase the band.
As a band we have been speaking for a while about increasing
our online content, especially with videos on YouTube and so the positive in
all of this is that it has pushed me to develop these skills. This has also led
me to research and learn about cameras and invest in a decent camera for
vlogging and doing videos not just for The Passing Sages but also my own online
teaching.
Whilst I don’t want to ignore the fact that a lot has been happening
in the world that is far more important than anything I might be doing or have
to say, for everyone sitting at home saying they are bored and don’t know what to
do, use this time that you have to push yourself, learn new skills and develop existing
ones and who knows, you may just discover a whole new passion.
Let us know about skills that you have developed during lockdown
and until next time, keep safe and stay classy!
Nic
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