I hooked up with a drummer and a bass player last week. We set up in the car port at my house and jam away for a few hours.
First session went pretty well. Doing old school blues, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Hound Dog Taylor, that kind of stuff.
Once we get 5 or 6 songs down, we’re going to start looking for a singer.
No plans to do the weekend bar gig deal, maybe an open mic thing here or there once we get a decent set down.
I’m also hoping at some point to go to a studio and record some stuff. Put it up on Distro Kid or Bandcamp, see if we can turn some 99 cent downloads into some beer money.
I played this A shuffle I came up with a few years ago when I was practicing hammer ons on pull offs and they liked it so we decided to do it as well.
I call it “Little Black Dress”. I don’t really have a melody line for it right now, but what few lyrics I have for it goes something like “See that girl in that little black dress, oh she looks so fine. Sweet young thing in her little black dress, I want to make her mine”.
Getting some chemistry going on with a group and holding together while getting the work in can just about require a miracle. It’s no wonder so many bands are short-lived, and I guess it’s just the nature of the beast. Good luck with this one.
My take is that a lot of songs are needed to keep momentum, the interest level high; more songs perhaps than would be covered in one practice session, maybe 50, 60 or more. It’s a grind esp if you’re including quite a bit of technical finesse [technique other than generic strumming]
But it’s a valuable asset to have essentially two complete setlists. The more songs the more the odd mistake happens at least for a time but an incredible amount can be absorbed with sheer persistence. In other words bite off too much then chew like crazy.
I’m not looking to put together a big catalog of songs. The few times I’ve been involved with bands that try to do that hasn’t worked well for me. But then again, they were gigging bands, and in a situation like that, I guess you need a lot of bullets in your holster.
Might be part of my problem, but I really don’t want to do gigs.
What I really want to do is get about 8 or 10 songs down, record them, then put them on DistroKid or Bandcamp, something like that, and see if we can scare up some beer money on those 99 cent downloads.
Besides, the live music scene here for blues and classic rock was pretty spotty before Covid. Since then, it’s almost nonexistent.
If it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing - that’s what I always say [but watch out for injuries!]
I’d posit that it might be difficult to keep drummers interested with a very limited catalog of songs, I’d imagine all that lugging and setting up the kit requires constantly renewed motivation or maybe at least a well stocked beer fridge.
Seems to me, if you want to be drummer, hauling the kit around comes with the territory. But there’s plenty of studios in town that have drum kits. So whatever works is fine with me.
I agree with overdoing it, but not in quantity, more in quality. Play the same thing over and over and over again. Maybe it’s just me, but I think being able to lay down a tight, in time, error free (for the most part) rhythm section requires more musicianship than just playing guitar hero stuff.
But that may be why I can’t find people to play with. They all want to be rock stars and don’t really care about how things sound. And that’s fine if that’s what floats their boats, I’m just not interested in doing that.
No worries, to each their own objectives. I’ve seen bands though build up a 200 song repetoire and play them all just like the record. I ate, slept and breathed gtr for the last 6 months and as a result got a 60 song repetoire, about 50 of which are now so ingrained I could play them in my sleep if it weren’t for the RSI I got from it.
It’s a carefully picked repetoire that should work well in pubs, clubs and even retirement homes. There’s only me but my nephew might step in on bass gtr sometimes and maybe hire a drummer. I’ve got the lead vocals and all the gtr covered. Some retirement homes are big these days and the gigs are during the day which is an attractive business goal [and lets face it, the folks there aren’t that much older than us so their music preferences are generally the same as my non hard rock/metal preferences.
There’s no hard rock/metal songs in my set whatsoever, there’s some ballads from those kind of bands though that allow for some ‘gtr histrionics’ all of a melodic style. E.g the middle 8 of the Scorpion’s ‘Wind of Change’ has the following progression [in the key I’ve decided to play it]
G# A# G Cm G# A# Cm G# A# G Cm F#m G#7
So to melodically solo over that in a one player scenario without losing steam kind of narrows the options but I play basically a bunch of lively arpeggios interspersed with some licks. I wrote it as a set piece as I don’t fancy trying to follow that progression whilst improvising. I just hope I get to play all this which has been meticulously prepared :sigh:
I just want to report that the recovery from the hand injury in the last few days has been excellent. It was only about a week ago when the fingers were still collapsing when trying to use them. But this last week, weeks four to five has seen a major comeback, I’m able to play everything now without pain or blowback, I guess I’m saying as others here have said, i.e if you get a gtr rsi then simply allow several weeks to overcome it. As Tol and Bevoss said also, play it smart and let the thing heal.
I’m practising like normal again, but with more awareness.
Good advice. I would add that when washing hands always use warm water where possible. I’m doing all that as part of warming up i.e some aerobic exercise, a warm hand wash and then warmup gtr exercise.
I played quite a bit yesterday and all good, feels normal.
So the bass player still wants to get together so we’ll see how things go.
I updated my Reaper install on an old laptop, I’ll use that for drum loops when we play.
I updated some plugins on it. I needed a bass amp plugin and I found one from Ignite Amps. I’ve been using their cab emulator for some time, so when I saw they had an updated emulator and a plugin for a tube guitar amp, I installed those on both the laptop and my PC.
I was using the Voxengo BoogX amp simulator on the PC, but I find I like the Ignite Amps better. For one thing, it doesn’t have as many controls to confuse me.
My interface is 2 channel so maybe at some point we can hook the guitar and bass in and record some stuff.
If we come up with something decent, I can always get Abraham Liftin from the Reaper site to come up with the drum track.
Hoping this might turn into a Steely Dan kind of thing where the bass player and I come up with stuff and then go out and find other musicians to add parts.
Might just get some stuff up on DistroKid after all!!!
[but watch out for injuries!]