The band practice is on the books for 4:00pm tomorrow. I should be super psyched.
I’m not.
We’re going to get slammed with a snowstorm tomorrow afternoon. Practice is going to get snowed out.
MUTHA PUSS BUCKET!
I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I swear that mother nature hates my guts. What a bitch!
It still looks like Sunday will have a band practice. The first one in ages.
I need to put new strings on my Les Paul Standard. I also need to not get too excited because statistically speaking it’s probably safe to assume something will take the plans and cock them up.
Ugh. I want to be in a band again! AARRGGHH!!!
Just saving this for later, as this blog sometimes serves as a browser/machine independent collection of bookmarks for me…
That’s a playlist of my band rehearsing each of the songs currently on our new-singer-audition-to-do-list. I haven’t listened to any of it yet so I don’t even know if the takes are complete or not, and I don’t know if they sound good enough to actually make anything out, and I don’t know if we made any colossal screw ups or anything.
In other words, this playlist might be a waste of time, but I did it during my lunch break so it is morally on the up and up.
I have a wordpress.com blog for the old band too. Maybe I’ll post it there for funzies.
The main focus of rehearsal last night was working out a set list. Kevin came up with a rough draft. I had one little suggestion for a change. Greg wanted more changes but couldn’t come up with alternatives so we punted. We ran through the list as it was with the expectation that we’ll edit it during group chats throughout the week.
I had some gear issues. Four or five songs into the setlist I switched off my spanky new Fulltone OCD ge for a second and then switched it back on and… nothing. Huh. I kicked it a couple of times and it came back but started cutting in and out. I shut it off again and left it that way. There’s a bad cable in there somewhere. I’ve been using the backup board at practice while I fiddle with everything on the main board at home. I mentioned a while ago that I took the fuzz pedal off the main board, but I still have one on the backup board, a Wren and Cuff Tall Font Russian. With the OCD off I was able to switch the Tall Font on and it was pretty stable. Okay then, for the rest of the practice I’m using fuzz.
The volume level with the fuzz on was the same as it was with the OCD on, but as soon as the band started playing I vanished from the mix. The Tall Font is a Big Muff clone and that’s a common issue with Big Muffs. All of the mid range frequencies are scooped out of the fuzz pedal so there is nothing in the sound of the guitar to differentiate it from the bass guitar on the low end or the cymbals on the high end. The work around is to just turn up the volume on the amplifier. I turned up until I could hear myself in the mix again and all was almost well. The problem now is how things work with the fuzz off. If I need to play clean the guitar will cut through the mix the way it’s supposed to and the volume change will result in everyone being nuked right out of their sneakers. The fix for that is to use the volume knob on the guitar. It doesn’t clean up perfectly the way a Fuzz Face circuit does, but it worked well enough. I ended up turning the neck pickup volume way down and leaving the volume up on the bridge pickup. When I wanted clean I just switched pickups. All problems solved.
After an hour or so we needed a bathroom break and I did some troubleshooting. I unplugged the cable coming out of the OCD and replaced it with the cable going into the amp. That eliminated the problem. Did it actually fix it or did I just get lucky and putzing around put everything into a state where it wasn’t cutting out anymore? I don’t know. I do know I needed to turn the volume on my amp back down. I was happy to be back to overdrive, but I was also sad to put the fuzz away again. I do so love a nasty fuzz sound, but I’m just more into a good overdrive now. All these options.
My playing as a whole was okay. I felt a little weird rhythmically, as in I was rushing sometimes and dragging sometimes and just funky (not in a good way) here and there. I was trying to keep my hands relaxed and it worked. No finger pain, no fatigue. My elbow started acting up again though and by the end of the night it hurt noticeably. It actually still hurt this morning. It’s starting to feel a little better now though.
The band sounded fine. We were focusing on songs we haven’t played in ages so there was rust, but when we hit things that are current for us we were pretty good. The show on Saturday is going to go well.
I have the backup board at practices but I am definitely using the main board at the gig. When I left last night I was 100% set on using the Deluxe Reverb as my amp. By the time I went to sleep I was starting to waffle on whether to use that amp or the Bassbreaker 18/30. I think I’m starting to lean toward the Bassbreaker.
I need to practice, practice, practice.
Four Days and 10 hours until gig day.
We had our first band practice in about a month tonight. The first time we’ve gotten together since the last gig. We were down one singer due to a sore throat, and there was some political joking around as the liberals in the band outnumbered the conservatives 2–1. (should we drop that 3-doors down song? I mean, they did play the inauguration)
I left my pedal board at home so that I can have it when RPM starts this week. I hope to have a new Fender tube amp (the 15 watt Bassbreaker) but that all depends on whether or not guitar center can get it’s head out of it’s ass.
How was my playing tonight? I’ll tell you in one word:
Suck.
Oh my goodness did I suck tonight. My RPM album is going to be atrocious.
Two things happened to me at tonight’s band practice that haven’t happened in all the years I’ve been practicing with bands.
First, my trusty Dunlop Cry Baby Wah-Wah pedal actually broke. I pushed down on the pedal to turn it on for a screaming psychedelic guitar solo and then stepped on it to turn if off when I was done… except it didn’t turn off.
After the song ended I tried to click the button with my hand and that didn’t turn it off either. The switch seems to have died a heroes death. I’ve owned three of those pedals over the years and I’ve never had one die before. I had one stolen once, but that doesn’t count. If I can’t fix it I’ll have to use the back up that’s in my cellar right now. Kinda glad I put together that stay at home pedal board.
The second thing that happened tonight that has never happened to me before is another tragic failure. I wear ear plugs when we play. Practice, gigs, whatever. If there is full band volume, I’m wearing ear plugs.
Tonight we sounded kinda loud. I chalked it up to last-rehearsal-before-the-gig-over-exuberance. Then at about the 2 and a quarter hour mark it happened. The ear plug in my left ear… fell out. How’s that for odd. That’s never happened to me before. One minute it’s in there, the next, boop, it’s on the floor. Safe to say that the reason for the extra volume can now be explained as my ear plug wasn’t in right. It felt okay going in, but I guess not.
Now everything on my left sounds like it’s far away and surrounded by ocean waves. Damn it.
The band rehearsed tonight. The first weeknight practice since I joined. It was weird having to deal with traffic to get there. That has never happened. We snuck this one in because one of the guys is going on a business trip for a few weeks. It’s tough getting all of us together this summer. Hopefully things will be easier in the fall.
I took my laptop and a couple of my new microphones with me, but traffic made me a tad late so I didn’t take the time to set them up to make a recording. I settled for my iPhone instead. I haven’t listened to it yet. I’ll edit it tomorrow and share anything that sounds decent. It’s going to sound like swill, but it’s always worth listening back. I’ll get the whole room mic’d up soon, but not until next month at least.
Last night’s band practice was… different. In a few ways.
It was the first rehearsal I’ve been to that was short a member. Greg the singer couldn’t make it. Kevin the drummer, Mike the bass player, and I decided to get together anyway.
Gear wise, I brought my Strat and… well… it’s wimpy. I ended up playing through my lead channel all night because the guitar just lacks balls. I may need to come up with some sort of alternate signal path specific to the Strat. Maybe a distortion pedal or something to beef thing up. The instant I had that thought I realized that I’ve been whining about my Les Paul being wimpy since I put in the Classic ’57 pick ups. Might a crunchy stomp box at the front of the chain solve that problem too? Probably not, but it’s cheaper and easier than buying and installing a new pick up.
Anyway, that’s not what felt different last night. Neither is the missing singer, really. What was different was that we played very hard. There was a level of intensity that hadn’t been there before and frankly it wore all of us out quickly. It took less than an hour for us to start feeling out of gas. I think there was less discussion between songs, and therefore less time to recover before moving to the next thing. Last night it was a case of someone throwing out a title, we crank through it, then as soon as we finish someone throws out another title. During the second hour we actually took a break. It was a five minute break that, thanks to talking about Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, turned into 20 minutes. It was necessary. It let us finish off the night with a bang.
For me personally, I have to make some big changes to the way I do things, and I’m not talking about gear (for once). It goes without saying that I need to practice more. The other guys have been playing these songs for years now and have them down cold. If they only practice as a warm up for rehearsal then that’s fine for them. Not for me. I take notes on the songs as I learn them and I am completely dependent on those notes. I can’t make it through without checking the cheat sheets and that has to stop right now. Practice will solve that issue.
More concerning, I am not physically capable of just setting up and playing my tail off for two hours. My hands cramp, my fingers get too stiff to play, my wrists hurt, my shoulders hurt, my arms hurt, my back hurts, my legs hurt. A solid two hour rehearsal is almost too much for me. I know I need to exercise more. That goes along with dieting and should result in improvement with my legs and my back. For my arms and my shoulders, I think the fix is to practice standing up. I am into the habit these days of sitting when I practice. I am not Robert Fripp so I should be standing.
My hands though… that is what scares me. I think I’ve mentioned it here before. I don’t want to get to the point where the pain in my hands exceeds the enjoyment I get from playing. I started doing a little research on things I can do to strengthen my hands and my fingers. Two things come up repeatedly. One is squeezing a tennis ball, or something similar. I should be doing that every day. When I’m sitting in front of the tube I should have one of those squeeze grip things in my hand. They actually make one geared for guitar players that lets you squeeze with each individual finger. I might have to get one of those. The other thing I need to do is stretch before I play. I was starting to get into the habit of doing just that when I joined Break Even for exactly the same reasons. A few songs into practice and my hands would be killing me. I need to get back to doing that. My research has shown me a few things to try. I need to never not do those exercises before playing again. I need to make it as much a part of my routine as tuning up. I very much want this band to start working in public again. That means I have to be ready to play hard for four hours a night. As it stands right now I don’t think I can do that. I will get there though. Definitely. Count on it.
I got home from some errands at about 2:00ish today. I went downstairs and took out my Fender. I changed the strings, then noodled around a little. I then played through a bunch of songs that the band has been working on. I hit most of them twice. At 4:00 I stopped and cooked dinner. After dinner I went to band practice. At some point, a little after 7:00, I hit the wall. My left hand stopped working for a little while. I couldn’t get my ring and pinkie fingers to do what I wanted them to do. They just cramped up and told me to go screw. We took five and after that I was better, but the communication between the brain and each hand was off for the rest of the practice. I felt seriously uncoordinated.
That, my friends, is why musicians practice. It’s not just to learn their parts. It is also to build up stamina. There is a tipping point where your skill level disappears. Back in 2005 I could play four 45 minute sets over four hours and not break down. There was a time in the early 90’s where I could probably play for 10 hours or more without a break and not lose it. Today? I probably crash after 45-60 minutes if I’m lucky. I must practice more. I must.
So how did the Strat do tonight? The single coil pickups didn’t make nearly as much noise as I feared they would. They also didn’t feedback. My amp was on the floor. I think if I had it on a stand, a couple of feet higher, it would have been easier. All in all though, the sound of the new guitar was very… stratty. Thin and brittle, like Strats often are. When it comes right down to it, I think the ES-335 is still my #1 guitar. Next practice I’ll bring the Les Paul Custom and see how that feels. It does seem though, that I am still a Gibson man through and through.
Inside the Red Head's Head 