How was Your rehearsal last morning or night ?

[tauzero]

Doing a dep gig with a band run by the chap who runs an open mic night or two that I go to, and they got me in for a rehearsal. Went reasonably, most of the songs are twelve-bars of some description with a couple of oddities - Sweet Child O' Mine, Light My Fire, Gangsters (medleyed with Roxette).

[kwmlondon]

11 hours ago, tauzero said:

Doing a dep gig with a band run by the chap who runs an open mic night or two that I go to, and they got me in for a rehearsal. Went reasonably, most of the songs are twelve-bars of some description with a couple of oddities - Sweet Child O' Mine, Light My Fire, Gangsters (medleyed with Roxette).

That sounds like FUN!

[kwmlondon]

I did a long rehearsal last night with a group I'm doing a gig with on Monday, and it was fun to spend some time with the guys, but I think I'm going to bow out after that's done. I like the two others in the band, and it's fun doing the guitarist's material - his songs have been great to write basslines for - but I just don't feel like I'm being challenged, musically. I feel like I need to find a project that'll push me to up my game, AND I really want to move more into disco/funk rather than the rock I've been doing. It'll be a shame - the afterpractise beers have been a highlight of the week! 

 

I took the Positive Grid Spark Live to the Pirate rehersal space in Camden as we could not book a room with amps and it totally kept up with the drummer. I even plugged the guitarist in for a couple of songs and it sounded really good with both of us - he loved the tone! However, it's just a bit too heavy to hoik around in a backpack so I've invested in one of those granny shopping trollies for £20. It will be way easier to get around with the bass strapped on my back and the amp trundling along behind...

[dmccombe7]

4 hours ago, kwmlondon said:

I did a long rehearsal last night with a group I'm doing a gig with on Monday, and it was fun to spend some time with the guys, but I think I'm going to bow out after that's done. I like the two others in the band, and it's fun doing the guitarist's material - his songs have been great to write basslines for - but I just don't feel like I'm being challenged, musically. I feel like I need to find a project that'll push me to up my game, AND I really want to move more into disco/funk rather than the rock I've been doing. It'll be a shame - the afterpractise beers have been a highlight of the week! 

 

I took the Positive Grid Spark Live to the Pirate rehersal space in Camden as we could not book a room with amps and it totally kept up with the drummer. I even plugged the guitarist in for a couple of songs and it sounded really good with both of us - he loved the tone! However, it's just a bit too heavy to hoik around in a backpack so I've invested in one of those granny shopping trollies for £20. It will be way easier to get around with the bass strapped on my back and the amp trundling along behind...

You could add more complex basslines to the rock music like Geddy Lee. Don't know what genre of rock you play so that was my only suggestion.

Other option is to keep two bands running as i have up until end of last year.

Dave

[kwmlondon]

On 30/05/2025 at 13:03, dmccombe7 said:

You could add more complex basslines to the rock music like Geddy Lee. Don't know what genre of rock you play so that was my only suggestion.

Other option is to keep two bands running as i have up until end of last year.

Dave

I could do but I’m starting to feel frustrated and I’d rather leave while we’re on good terms. There were points at the last rehearsal where I was really not enjoying it. 

[Lo-E]

Quite good!

 

Of the three bands I play in, this is the least disciplined and we rehearse in the worst space so I always go into rehearsals with low expectations. 
 

A new (better) drummer has the rest of the band on their best behaviour so: the guitarists didn’t drink too much, we only took one smoke break (I don’t smoke so these drive me crazy) and we focused on the songs and got work done instead of hashing about and wasting time. Hooray!

 

In addition, the tiny, messy, shared rehearsal space doesn’t have a working bass amp so I usually plug into the anemic P.A.  Last night I decided to try plugging through a Sansamp BDDI (I am playing sans amp, after all) and it was a huge improvement. That little pedal, which I seldom use, did exactly as advertised and I’ll be using it for rehearsals from here on out. It sounded really nice, even through that lame P.A.

[Chienmortbb]

6 minutes ago, Lo-E said:

we only took one smoke break (I don’t smoke so these drive me crazy

I with you on that one brother.

[dmccombe7]

4 hours ago, kwmlondon said:

I could do but I’m starting to feel frustrated and I’d rather leave while we’re on good terms. There were points at the last rehearsal where I was really not enjoying it. 

Sometimes you just know.

Wish you luck with any new projects and keep us all posted.

Dave

[Franticsmurf]

The Hulla band has its self organised festival coming up and one of the acts on the line up is a choir made up of volunteers for a local homeless charity (one of the recipients of the funds raised by the band each year). They are also singing 6 songs with the band - it's become a tradition over the last three festivals. Last night we had the first rehearsal with them this year. They are very good - their leader is a gifted singer in her own right (she usually joins the Hulla band for the festival gig). The songs they are doing with us are 'For What Its Worth', 'Knocking on Heaven's Door', 'Run', 'One Day Like This', 'Like a Prayer' and 'Burning Love'. There are some beautiful gospel vibes on 'Knocking on Heaven's Door' and 'Like a Prayer' but the song of the night was 'One Day', which had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. Rig du jour was my recently acquired Ibanez GSR205 through a Vox VX50 bass amp (tiny, plastic but a great practice amp with lovely bass).  

 

We were also experimenting with how to mic up the choir for the festival so I was working with our sound man to test a few microphone combinations. Today's homework is to take the recordings we made and separate them into different mic set-ups so we can confirm what was chosen on the night. We tried a pair of small diaphragm condensers, a pair of 'cheap' dynamics and a pair of SM58s in various physical set ups and the sound man decided the SM58s at just above head height, separated by 9 feet (as suggested by the Shure website, apparently) gave the best sound. I was also trying out a Behringer boundary mic which I had recently acquired, more for my interest than a contender, and I was very happy with the results.