TimR

Iron Maiden had it sussed.

Get some cards printed. Go watch some cover bands. Work out who the main man is and chat. Put cards up in local guitar shop. Same as advertising yourself as available to join a band but just not as a permanent player. The more bands you play with, the more word will get around. I’m playing in a covered band but do the occasional dep for people I’ve played with before or people they know.

Have you considered depping?

I listened to it live on Radio 2. Thought it sounded awesome. Crowd were loving it. I cant image watching them to be particularly riveting. I’m sure they used to add loads of dancers in hot pants to their gigs to liven it up.

No one should come to first rehearsal with any specific ideas of how you are going to play the song. Unless someone has sat down and written out arrangements, the first play though is to feel how a song goes with your individual’s abilities and styles. After a few play throughs it should be obvious 1. Whether the song works. 2. What parts clash. 3. Which bits are empty and whether they need filling. Deciding on a fill, before you’ve even played a note is daft. So is deciding on a harmonic line when you’re just assuming that the guitarist will be playing what’s on the original recording. If you’re not, why should he be? And people who can’t play bass showing me how to play a line on bass is always entertaining. I let them show me, say “That’s interesting”, mostly it’ll be an incoherent mess, then I do what I want.

@casapete Yes. I went outside and ordered it on my phone for delivery next day. Same price.

Which makes me suspect that it’s done deliberately to get customers into the shop. I had exactly the same conversation practically word for word in two separate Currys stores. They really didn’t want to sell me the PC. Suggesting the next model up. Then checking stock to find that the 3 on the system didn’t exist and when I suggested I’d buy the one on display, both stores spent at least 15 minutes ‘looking for the boxes’ before deciding they couldn’t find them and on no account could they sell them without the box. The same happened with Bluetooth headphones in 3 stores. The £15 ones wouldn’t be suitable for me, then they couldn’t find any in the stock room. I wonder how many people are upsold all sorts of things.

I think online stock levels still require a certain amount of manual intervention. Not bass related but I was after a kickboard for my kitchen from B&Q. My 4 local stores all had it in stock. I visited them all, after the second one I phoned ahead to the third one. Yes. They had one in stock. Finally it seems that the item I wanted was discontinued anyway. I doubt it’s done deliberately, except for PCWorld/Curry’s where they definitely stock extremely cheap PCs to get people into the store and then upsell, it’s just bad management of inventory.

I think it’s partly because often you come out of a big chorus into a verse for the solo and that’s usually when a song scales back anyway. I think the way forward is to record the song and see if it actually is losing drive and thickness or whether it’s my imagination. I’d then be able to play around in my own time and see what works.

We kind of have. And the bottom falls out of the songs in the solos and the songs lose momentum. Yes. Space, and light and shade are important but don’t think the guitar solo is necessarily the right place for them.

Cool. No one will remember the bum note and half the audience won’t notice a guitar out of tune if your singer is running around and getting all the attention.

I think they’re some Pink and Christine Aguillera numbers. Lots of strings/keys padding the sound. Some of them need to descend to D so mean playing up the octave.

Timescale-wise. We have learned about 12 songs from scratch in about as many practices and played our first ‘full’ gig with the new singer two weeks ago. We have a 30minute slot to fill on Saturday evening with the last practice last night. Sitting down and working out arrangements doesn’t really happen, we jam through a song and improvise round it to see if it works quickly. Then develop it or scrap it depending on first impressions.

Indeed it can. However that takes time. The songs are evolving slowly. Most of them are fine. Just two or three that have no baseline other than 8th root notes.

Exactly my thoughts. Traditional power trio bands is what we’ve been covering for 5+ years and all have an arrangement already well suited for bass and guitar by their very nature Modern pop doesn’t. So having rhythm section chugging over a fairly bland solo is what we end up with. The problem is if the rhythm section is just bass and drums I can’t carry on chugging along with any real effectiveness. The risk with creating a tasteful bass lick is the “it doesn’t go like that” reaction I’m likely to encounter but I’ll see what I can come up with. It may actually go down very well. I do have a chorus pedal. I think I’ll just whack that on and see what happens for starters.