Wow! This has been intense!
I have just spend two weeks time within my holidays at the so called "Summer-Academy"!
The Summer Academy is a two-week-long course by the School Of Music, which is located in Hamburg, and basically giving you an extended version of a crashcourse of music theory regarding harmonics, ear training as well as rhythmic training. Along with that you have bandtraining on a daily basis guided by two professionals giving you feedback, things to work on and just making it a bit more structured and fun than it'd normally be! And on top of that you get daily one on one classes in your main subject, in my case vocals as well as that every second day you have one on one classes in your side subject, in my case guitar. And as if that is not already enough to take you also have four to five workshops regarding other important topics like music and buisness, songwriting, studiorecording, plagiarism etc. All given by professionals that are in the buisness and making a living off of music. And just because this is not enough either you get to perform in one of the clubs of Hamburg. And all this within only ten days.
Arriving the first monday I was really excited what sort of people I'd meet. Which kind of genre they're all coming from and whether they want to continue their path and make music for a living.
Surprisingly I found myself not only in a group of young teenagers like myself, but there were also people who were way older and maybe even had children and were just coming to learn something about their hobby.
But I found myself immediatly chatting with the people of my age and teaming up with another singer-songwriter, Ben Schafmeister. We were instantly on sort of the same wavelength and rushed into a conversation about guitarstring-preferences, guitars and songwriting. Accompanied by two insanly skilled guitarists, Meiko and Jonas, which later on became one of my closest friends within the Summer Academy, we four ended up playing in one band.
And as Ben had already written some songs as well, we arranged three songs: one written by Ben, one written by myself and one version of Life In The Fast Lane by The Eagles. [Yes, this one does still exist for all you millenium kids ;-) ]
The reason why we picked these songs may be sort of obvious...except for the last one.
We chose the last one because being in a band with mainly metalheads except for you and the other singer, it's really hard to come up with a compromise that satifies not only the metalheads but the singer-songwriters too. So we arranged and came up with our own version of this "oldie" , which surprisingly turned out to be really fun to perform. From my side we performed a reggea version of a song that will be on the upcoming project: Backseated.
And speaking of perfoming, we all did so in none other than the FREUNDLICH+KOMPETENT in Hamburg.
However, having the normal class-schedule, me and Meiko rushed directly after our classes finished from the School Of Music to the club to perform in front of Hamburg and of course the other bands that teamed up within the last two weeks as well.
It was a hell of a feast and everybody was just having fun on stage and watching everybody else. And as we wanted to dedicate our band to one of our coaches, Malte, we decided to call our Band "M.A.L.T.E." and let the audience have him spell his name. [And yes, we were kind of obsessed with him :D ]
And if Malte ever sees this silly blogpost I want him to read : "Yeah, Malte" ;-)
After we finished recording Backseated the last weekend we all came together and sat down for a final meal in a local restaurant near the School. This was also really cool, because you had the opportunity to just sit down, look back on these two weeks and just reflect!
Going home afterwards I was feeling kind of nostalgic, since the majority of people that I met and worked and had so much fun with is living in a different part of germany, so we'll most likely never play again in this arrangement. But to be given the chance to play in this constellation, I want to thank everyone who was involved with this: All the Coaches, The School and all the people that I got to meet and play with. You all were incredible and I hope to see and play with y'all again, thank you so much!
I want to leave a special thank you for Latonius, another coach from California that is travelling the world, who brought me, Meiko and Ben out to an open stage at the Sands Bar to play and hang out with his gospel choir. It was as well an amazing night!
All the photos that you can see are very few and selected from a facebook folder of The School.
As soon as I get all the other pictures and videos of the concert I will of course put the up here!
The special Version of Backseated will soon be availlable as well.
Mo Rice*
This is exactly what we were told on the friday of Talented. And two days prior to the concert BAINFRAIHAIT and me were standing in the rehearsal room and trying to figure out what to play on this event.
"I mean it could kinda be embarrassing as a school based band not to be playing at the school concert."
It was that statement by our drummer that we all agreed upon and what made us improvise and dig deep into our repertoire and come up with a cover of "Fluorescent Adolescent" by the Arctic Monkeys. As the song wasn't that new for us we started jamming along and as we got into the song we already felt this pleasant feeling of how fun it is to be playing with a band again. And that joy we took into the last on-stage rehearsal and straight into our performance.
We really hope you enjoyed it as much as we did playing it, because (at least for me) it was hella fun. :P
Not only that but I got to perform "Another Lovestory" again, which was really fun since a big percentage of the audience from Talented was at that event as well, so quite a lot of people already knew the song.
The official Mo Rice* YouTube channel will be lauched very soon, so stay tuned as I will release several performance videos!
Mo Rice*
Obviously our school, the world-famous Alstergymnasium, is not the most known venue around, however we decided to play our show there for various reasons. First, we as a band are quite known at our school, which comes in handy as we don’t have to rent the venue nor do we have to pay and be responsible for all of the electronic stuff. The light and the sound of the show was done by a couple of mates that we already got in touch with due to other concerts we already played at. And the show itself was great. It was great in the sense that it really was a great experience. We played around one hour, mainly covers as well as „Another Lovestory“.
Starting with energetic handclapping and stomping feet the show started off great. But the crowd did not stop there. With crowdworking and the audience singing the show turned out way better than we imagined it to be. As at the end we were asked to play a bonus it topped off everything. All in all it was awesome. We were given instant feedback on how to improve as well as compliments as to how great it was. And from not-so-well-hitten notes to goosebumps and signing autographs - it was all in there.
The next concert I will certainly be a part of is „Talented“ as well as our summer concert. Hope to see you there!