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Home > MonaLisa News > The forming of "MonaLisa and Band"

The forming of MonaLisa & Band!

With "band" in that case we mean our family band. Our Dad and Michaela (our step-mommy) have founded a band with us so that we could play together what we have learned in our music lessons. It's just more fun to make music with others instead of always practicing alone.

In the following I (Mona) will tell you about the interesting story how we came to form a band and how we meanwhile have developed. On the page From 0 to 13 you probably have read about our past musical history. I will hop in at the point when we got our first own instruments for Christmas 2004 and when we started with drum and guitar lessons at High School.

Here I got snapshotted while practicing on the guitar.

We used to spend our afternoons or weekends in our Daddy's recording studio to play all the songs together that we have learned in our High School music lessons. Our Dad used to accompany Lisa and me on his keyboard. That was great fun, of course, and our delight in music grew fast.

I can remember very well that we wanted to play Knocking on heaven's door by all means. So we sat there in the studio and sang (or should I better say "bawled" ? J). Sometimes there were special songs we loved very much and then we wanted to play them on our own instruments immediately. Thus we printed out the chords and Daddy helped us to study them a little bit.

But at that time our practicing hours were quite aperiodic and we improved just marginally. Thus the standard was accordingly lower than today.

Our first real "gigs" we had at High School. Lisa played with her guitar group at our first school Christmas concert. I drummed with the other percussionists, and we liked it very much to be on stage. It was the 25th anniversary of our school when Lisa and I sang together the "Polgar-Rap" (The name of our school is Polgar High School). Imagine: Two 10 year old twin girls rapping in front of the proud school principal - the show was perfect ;)

We became more self-assured with each performance. One day we decided with our Daddy to play five songs for our own birthday party 2006: Goodbye my lover, Proud Mary, Smoke on the water, Wonderful tonight and Stand by me. (A klick on these links will bring you to the audio samples of our 1st Live-Concert.)

It was quasi our first own concert. Lisa played guitar and sang, Daddy accompanied us on the keyboard and sang "Smoke on the water", and I played the drums. At that time our Dad couldn't play bass yet (he imitated the bass on the keyboard) and neither could Lisa play drums nor could I play a single tone on the guitar. Michaela couldn't play any appropriate band-instrument and did not play with us in those days.

Not only our school friends liked our music but also our families enjoyed to be our first "own" audience. They were surprised and impressed at once that we have already learned so much.

During summer holidays 2006 we then recorded these five songs on a CD and gave it our grandpa for his birthday. He passed the birthday-CD round, to all his relatives and friends what we didn't even know in the beginning. So we got many requests for a real big MonaLisa-Concert. Such a concert we planned to give in summer 2007 - and it definitely took place.

The forming of the band in January 2007

For a concert with an attractive and ambitious song repertory it was necessary to have more musicians respectively to be able to play more instruments. Our Dad always wanted to play guitar in addition to the keyboard and therefore he took the chance to finally learn it. So he could also play the bass which many times was missing anyhow. Michaela had gotten some recorder and piano lessons when she was a child. So she was thinking of an instrument which she could learn fast and which we could use in our band. Thus she got an alto saxophone from our both families for her birthday and so also her dream to make music again could come true.

Our mutual studio sessions became longer and longer and our musical level increased. Our new band member learned extremely fast and very soon we were able to play as a foursome. Daddy wrote some wonderful solos for Michaela's saxophone. In the other songs that didn't go with a saxophone she took on the background vocals and/or the percussions with tambourine, shaker & co.

Lisa Wagner singing into a professional microphone

Like in a movie: Lisa sings into an "over-super-hyper"-microphone.

Now real work was indicated (here you can see Lisa singing). Our Dad arranged, composed and did all the audio engineering stuff. Each one of us studied his/her vocal and instrumental parts. We rehearsed, refined, rewrote, created new vocals, choirs, etc. With our concert we had appointed ourselves a date on which we had to be able to play/sing everything correctly. And as we still were only four people, each one of us played two or three instruments at the concert. That was very exciting and instructive.

Perhaps some of you would think now that it is old-fashioned to have a band with one's own parents. But we find it cool. Of course, we want to have our own band without adults some day. But for that we will still have to learn a lot more and that's what we can do in our family band. While playing together we have learned that for having or being a band it is not enough that everyone is able to play his own parts. Without that you don't even need to start. But besides that, you have to know something about music (harmonies, composition, eartraining), about audio engineering, acoustics, electronics. And it's very important that you are well organized and that you have an experienced bandleader. All that we are learning right now so that we know enough to lead our own band later and to get good musicians who would want to play with us.

In our band everything goes by "division of work". And also in other fields we hold together strongly. For example: Lisa and I wrote the texts for our website, Michaela "polished" them a bit, added the music glossary and song informations (translations coming soon) and did the graphics and site navigation. Daddy helped us with the MonaLisa-graphics and -photo, with the mp3 files and with the technical stuff so that the site is running orderly in the net (after all he's the only man here in the house J). And this does not only work so regarding the website or the band. We always are a team and help each other.

That's it for the subject of MonaLisa & Band. If you have any further questions, please write in our baskets to Mona privately and to Lisa privately.

Bye, bye and thank you for reading everything so bravely.

Yours, MonaLisa

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