A making of a concert - Episode 4 - Rehearsals

Hello everyone!
Today, this series of articles about the making of a concert goes on.
After doing some workshops, selected my gear and programmed it, now is the time to rehearse all together.

There are several kinds of rehearsals.

Rehearsals to set up the songs:
There are rehearsals where a band meet, wondering what to play, and everyone begins to look for what to do on a song. I call it a set up rehearsal. Everyone has to learn how to play the song, and find what to do. This is generally what bands do when they compose together. In these cases, the rehearsals are regular and numerous. They can be done anywhere as long as there is a minimum of gear for everyone to have a sound.
In this example, for the concerts of Clara Neville, this is basically the work we have done in our small workshops with André, David and Clara. After these workshops, everyone knew what to do, we had to rehease... which brings me to the other kind of rehearsals.

Rehearsals for the concert:

I don't play in bands that rehearse regularly, so these are the rehearsals that I know best.

In this case, everyone knows what to do, everyone is ready to play in the band, we just have to...do it, in stage conditions. It is usually done in a rehearsal studio, soundproofed, in order to have the volume that we'll have on stage.
With Clara Neville, we have two rehearsals before the concert on June 7th. We do that at the studio Luna Rossa (in Paris). This is the first time we all meet together.

The gear I take to rehearse.

Each member of the band comes with its gear, finds a place in the studio, plugs his gear, and chat a little with the others (this is the first time Clara, Andre and I meet Luc, the drummer ), and we begin to play.
It's during this rehearsal that we make ​​some adjustments, rehearse the beginnings and ends of the songs, I adjust my sounds (I usually refine my programming during these rehearsals, there is always a louder sound than another, one that doesn't sound as it should...)

We usually divide this rehearsal in two steps:
- We start by playing all the songs at once. At the end of each song, we talk about it, to know if there are any comments, questions, things to change...and we note them for later, and we move to the next song.
We don't start working on the song at this moment for a simple reason: we don't know ourselves enough as a band, so that we can not say whether the imper
fections were due to one of us or the band. Playing all the songs once gives us enough time to fell good as a band.

All my gear plugged

- Then, once we played all the songs once, we begin to work on the details. We usually begin by playing the whole song with the changes noted above, and then we play the parts that cause problems, even if we have to play a dozen times the ending to know it !

The last rehearsal before a concert is usually dedicated to play the entire set of songs at once. We play all the songs in the order they will be played with a minimum of time between songs.
A small note: who knows why, but we say that the worse this last rehearsal is, the better the concert will be... something that was true a couple of times. However, the contrary isn't true.

The next article will be on the day of the concert. I 'll post it a few hours before playing, you'll then have all the details about the preparation of a concert. If you're in Paris, come and see us playing with Clara Neville, on the boat El Alamein, at 8:30 PM !