A making of a concert - Episode 1 - Workshops

Hello everyone,

Today, I start a small series of articles about what happens before a concert .
Many of you know that before being on stage, we rehearse, but before that, there are other things.

I was recently contacted by David Keler to play with Clara Neville on stage on the 7th and 13th of June, which gives me the opportunity to talk about the preparation of theses concerts.
I did not know Clara Neville until David called me and offered me to be part of the live musicians. I then went to listen to a few songs during the recording of the EP, then I received the recordings. This is where the preparation work begins.

On the recordings, David, director and producer of the album, played almost all the instruments. On stage, it is not possible. He chose a team of musicians to accompany Clara . There will be David  Keler (bass), Luc Durand (drums), André Margail (guitar), Clara Neville (vocals) and myself on keyboards.
The goal of these concerts is to promote the release of the Clara's recently recorded EP. As musicians, we have to try to get close to what has been done on the record.

Above all, I transcripted the chord progressions. I didn't composed the songs, so I didn't know them. I note the chords, the keyboard sounds used, and any other riffs or melodies made ​​by the keyboards.

Then we met with David and André to choose what to play in each song.
We only have one guitarist, and I only have two hands ... so, we have to choose, for each of us, which is most relevant to play, to stay close from the original recordings.

Since we can not play everything, there are several solutions :

- We could launch samples. The pro of this method is that it is possible to do on stage all that was done in the studio. Personally, in addition to the technical constraints (obligation for the drummer to play with a clic), I think we lost a little spontaneity on stage.

- Or we could decide not to play these parts at all. The pro is that everything is really live, but there is something missing from the recordings.

With André and David, we agreed: there are some songs with ambient noises or long synths playing on a entire song ... these not rhythmical elements, we chose to launch their samples (I will do it, and I 'll tell you more in a future post).

For other instrumental parts that we are not able to play, we decided... not to play them at all, even if we had to change the parts we play to make "hybrid" parts, which include the essential elements of each parts.
For example, André plays a riff with plain chords and arpeggios at the same time, whereas there are two separate parts on the record. As a compromise, André doesn't play the exact arpeggio or chord part of the record.

So, you have now a brief overview of the work done before a concert. There will be other posts on other steps, such as rehearsals, soundchecks, keyboard programming...

See you soon !