It’s now a couple of days after Christmas. I hope you all got some great guitar-related gear.
A couple of weeks ago I played at my church’s carols event. It went well and everyone was happy with the outcome – importantly the people who came enjoyed themselves.
I’ve done a lot of carols events over the past 20 years and learnt a lot from doing them, so today’s post is all about the things I learnt from playing at carols.
- Know the songs well. No-one minds if you play with the charts in front of you, but you still need to know how to play the songs. I sat down with mp3’s of all the songs and opened them on my PC using Native Instrument’s Guitar Rig program. This program allows you to change the tempo of the track whilst still maintaining the correct pitch. This is really handy for slowing down lead lines to learn them at a slower speed. The problem we had was that some of the songs were in different keys to those on the mp3’s, so we spent a while sorting out the correct arrangements.
- You need a leader. Someone needs to take the lead in these rehearsals and make sure the song goes well. Ideally, you need a leader for the musicians, and one for the singers. The singers need to know their lines and also know their entry and exit points for each song (verse, chorus, bridge etc). Ideally, the person leading the song (the main singer) should lead it and (if needed) give cues to the band.
- Play for the song. On a few of the songs I found myself getting bored and started trying to play different stuff. The problem was that while the different stuff was technically more challenging, the song didn’t need it and it actually got in the way of the song. So I stopped and played simpler.
- Simplify your sound. I use a POD X3 Live and I recently bought a Line 6 DT 25 amp head and box. You can imagine the range of sounds available from these two pieces of equipment. But when I had a good listen to the songs that had been selected, I realised I only needed a couple of sounds. So I made things really simple. I used the POD purely as an FX unit. My signal chain was my Variax Guitar -> POD X3L -> DT 25 Amp. I used a footswitch to change channels on the amp. I had a couple of overdrive / distortion effects on the POD that I could turn on or off. So some songs were into the clean channel, some had OD before that, others were running through the dirty channel and when I really needed some extra gain, I used the dirty channel with a distortion or boost on the POD. I had a bit of delay running and little bit of reverb. And some compression. But not 20 different patches.
- Compression sounds good. I’ve never used a lot of compression on my guitar, but I did for this gig. I had a patch set up on the POD that had a basic amount of compression on it. The guitar wasn’t compressed harshly, but I noticed as I was playing that the compression helped to even out the sound and it sounded more ‘thick’ to my ears. I need to experiment more with this!
There you have it – the five things I learnt playing carols.
There is a bonus sixth thing – have fun! People are very forgiving at events like this. They don’t expect perfection so don’t feel the pressure to provide it. I said to the band that throughout all the songs we’ll all make mistakes. The thing to remember was that we’d make our mistakes at different times so it wouldn’t be obvious. If the bass player messes up a not, chances are the rest of us have nailed it so no-one else would notice.
What do you think? Have you played at carols events before? What advice would you share?