Session diary Conducting Oneself
Parking woes, big-name productions and following along with an orchestral conductor. It’s all in a day’s work for Adam Goldsmith…
This month has proved as much of a parking and logistics challenge as it has a musical one. I’ve been involved in two big productions at the Royal Albert Hall (don’t even try and park near it to get your gear in), and the rehearsals have been at Abbey Road Studios (at present a building site, don’t even try and park near it to get your gear in), BBC Maida Vale Studios (four-hour meters, sadistic traffic wardens, don’t even try and park near it to get your gear in), and back to my house (road resurfacing, don’t even try to park near it and… well, you get the idea). I do feel much better now I’ve got that off my chest, though, so thank you, dear reader, for being my therapist at the last minute. It really is much appreciated.
The productions in question are firstly a Disney celebration concert with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and this week the house band for Children In Need Rocks, where we play with artists ranging from Take That to Ellie Goulding and Gregory Porter.They are both quite different propositions, which require very different approaches and skill sets.As anyone who ever played in or watched an orchestra knows, there is a conductor. From my memory, there wasn’t a conductor in Megadeth, which is basically how I learnt to play guitar, so learning how to interpret them, while not giving away you have no idea what they are doing, is a sink-or-swim experience at first. For a start, classical musicians have a tendency to feel the beat as more fluid and‘later’than a rock or pop musician might expect, so you have to factor that in. My first orchestral experience in my early 20s of having an entire symphony orchestra stifling their laughter as I steamed in on very loud banjo about 10bpm too fast and two seconds too early is not one I care to repeat. In my experience, this can be one of the most challenging aspects of my job, while juggling instrument and patch changes at lightning speed as they are not necessarily factored into the pace of the concert.
Herein lies the trick of marking up your pad of music well.Your best bet to not completely embarrass yourself – even before you get to the‘playing the guitar’bit – is to mark in as much information as possible, such as how many beats the conductor will give you into the top of the chart, any musical cues you can glean (for example,‘bass drum crotchets here’ or similar) or important instrument changes. For example, for the Disney gig, which was last night as I write this, I had no time between songs to go from a rock-ish electric sound to a capo’d acoustic solo with the singer. So, on that occasion, I deemed it more important to drop out early from the previous tune, at a musically appropriate time, attach the capo to the acoustic, retune it with the capo on and control my nerves enough to play a delicate solo in front of 5,000 people with a cameraman stepping on my leads and pointing his lens at my left hand. No pressure, then.
After all that, you pack your own gear up, inevitably leave a lead or a guitar stand at the gig, remove the obligatory parking ticket from your windscreen, go home and watch the telly.
We start the Children In Need gig this week. It’ll be fun playing straightforward pop songs, with the other guitar player being the fabulous Paul Stacey. No capos and no classical guitar, hopefully.What could possibly go wrong?