The Morgan Auditorium fills with fog and bright neon lights as the Rock Band gets ready for their concert at the annual Creative Arts Expo. Each hour of consistent effort and practice every day for 5 months has led up to this very moment. While training hard for 5 months, two members are not officially enrolled in the class: senior Quintin Vece on guitar and sophomore Alistair Hampton-Dowson on drums.

The drummer for previous years, Oliver Taboda, graduated last school year, and Rock Band was unable to find someone to fill the position for this school year. During rehearsals, Mr. Orduz would either play the drums or play a drum soundtrack.

Orduz asked Hampton-Dowson to play drums for Rock Band at the start of the semester, as he has 5 years of experience, and plays the drums in the Concert Band in the pit for Goodspeed. For the last few days before the concert, Hampton-Dowson practiced with the full group. “There were a few things we were expecting not to go exactly as planned,” Julia Palazzo, senior and lead singer of rock band, said, “but when things did go wrong, Alistair was able to come in and save us.”

While Vece still performed in the concert, he was not officially enrolled due to his engineering class being the same period. Vece is passionate about engineering, as he is planning on studying Mechanical Engineering at UConn. Despite having to do what was best for his future career, Vece still found time to show up to some after-school rehearsals or in-class rehearsals if his engineering class had no active work. Playing the guitar is one of his major passions.

The rock band is unique from Morgan’s concert band and chorus. “ If it were a concert band, I’d have sheet music, and we’d either sight-read it, or we’d go over bits and pieces…” said Orduz, “The biggest challenge about teaching rock bands…it’s not a traditional music class.”

However, in Rock Band, students submit the songs they want to perform on a lead sheet. A lead sheet is a student-submitted form with chords and lyrics. Then, they think about whether the music is formatted correctly, and if it is accomplishable.

Rock Band class is a class that is only offered during the second semester of the school year, a few months before the Creative Art Expo. “We’ll start going through songs from the year before and think, do we want to keep this or do we want to get rid of it?” said Orduz.

When it gets closer to the concert, the members start to put together a set list of around 11-12 songs, ensuring they can do as many songs as they can.

The song selection process has been a crucial part of each concert. Last year, the Morgan Rock band performed Karma Police by Radiohead, which was not featured in this year’s concert because of its repetition in previous years. However, a new song was introduced. The Night Begins to Shine from the popular children’s TV show, Teen Titans Go.

Once there is a rough idea of what songs are being performed, practice starts. “We start going through it. We’ll go watch YouTube tutorials and things like that,” said Orduz. “If there are things that I know that’ll help that tutorial, then I’ll feed them along with it.”

Even if the members of Rock Band know the songs, it is still important to them that they perfect them in every way possible. Before practice officially starts, guitars are tuned, and amplifiers are taken out.

The first few songs are run through, with either a drum track or help from Orduz due to the lack of a drummer. “If all goes well, we’ll get through 2-3 songs,” said Erik Toothaker, junior guitarist of Morgan’s Rockband.

Soon enough, the day of the concert came. Before the concert started, the band ran through their songs.

Senior Julia Palazzo has been one of the lead singers for the past two years. “I made sure I practiced all my songs. I read through all of them over again, and I made sure to drink a lot of water,” said Palazzo.

“For the first hour or so, we ran through different songs and made sure everything was correct,” Toothaker said.

When the concert came around, everyone was prepared. They stepped onto the foggy, bright, and neon stage, getting ready for their first song. There were multiple microphone and speaker tests to ensure everyone could hear one another.

While the concert was fun and exciting for all, the rock band members had their critiques. “I need to practice standing and singing, which is way different than sitting and singing,” Palazzo said, “I think I should have trained for that a bit more because my voice was a bit shaky.”

Some of the songs that were performed didn’t exactly go as planned. “There are definitely songs in there that we’re not sure are gonna work when we’re doing them live…it’s definitely still an experiment,” said Orduz, “Whereas the full school performance, we’ll try to get rid of those songs that are not going to work out.”

The Creative Art Expo is an event dedicated to the art of Morgan students, held in May of each year. It features small appetizers cooked by students who take Culinary courses taught by Susan Murphy, art created by students in art courses taught by Justin Sylvia, and the Morgan Rock Band performance from the Rock Band class taught by Vidal Orduz.

Now that the Creative Arts Expo concert is over, Rock Band then shifted its gears towards preparing for the full-school performance, which took place during advisory on Thursday, May 28th. To prepare, they removed a few songs to fit the timeframe they had.

“I feel pretty confident about how it went…It was a very fun performance,” said Palazzo.