9.12.09 Practice

9.12.09 NWJ practice noon to 3pm…
Practice went well ... we figured out a few things…

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Choosing Songs for the Relay for Life Setlist Rules
1. The six member of NWJ all have one vote per song.
2. Each member also have one “force” and one “veto” for the Relay for Life Setlist.
3. If a member elects to use their “force”, that means the song will be practiced and inserted into the Relay for Life Setlist.
4. If a member elects to use their “veto”, that means a song that had previously been voted on and inserted into the Relay for Life Setlist will be removed.

5. We move forward with practicing and including a song into the Relay For Life Setlist if:
5a. 6 members vote yay.
5b. 5 members vote yay. If five members vote yay, that song cannot be vetoed.
5c. 4 members vote yay. If four members vote yay, the other two members may elect to use their veto. If they do not elect to veto the song, it will be practiced and inserted into the Relay for Life Setlist.

Note:
I’d recommend that if you are not planning on singing the song you “force”, you should clear it first with the singer you had in mind, so that they’re not put into a position where they have to sing a song they really don’t like or wouldn’t care about performing well.
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We tentatively picked 4 songs we’d like to practice and insert into the Relay for Life Setlist.
They are:
I Wanna Rock and Roll all Nite, KISS
Just Like Heaven, The Cure
Don’t Stop Believing, Journey
Smooth Criminal, Michael Jackson/Alien Ant Farm

We’ll see how things go moving forward, we have a saying where I work in design. It’s “Don’t fall in love with your lines.” Meaning that whatever we come up with is possibly subject to change, so if everyone can stay flexible we should be good.

Anyways, we should be practicing those 4 songs, as well as staying sharp on the previous songs we performed we wanted to keep in our repertoire, but not necessarily perform at RFL 2010.
I'll post those songs we chose soon.

Oh yeah, we also practiced A Million Lives for the first time.
It's a song that I wrote that Ryan developed the chords for. It went pretty well. It was good that I printed out the song with some of the chords we had figured out on them for everyone.
We basically went 4 drum clicks and just came in with the guitar and words. After the 4th time playing it, we had some stop/starts down in the chorus as well as some drum fills.
There was some time in the practice when Ryan was trying to figure out what direction we should take the chords in while Joel was just practicing the chords we had. Not sure if it's better to try and figure them on the fly or in-between practices. It's probably a little bit of both. At the very end, at Annalisa's suggestion, they took the chords up a step and a half. So I think it went from G to Bb. That led to some high harms being discovered easily in the verses. Ryan also said he had a lead on a few chord builds. J will be key in developing fills between verses and chorus. He's basically the only one that can do it. I need to figure out what I want to do on the bass. Overall, it went fairly well... we'll see I guess.

Next practice is in 3 weeks.