Playing
As things with our little trio where starting to progress quite well, I was hit with our set back. Our drummer had to leave. He has a busy working and family life and needed to dedicate more time to his family and job, plus he wasn’t %100 convinced by the music we where playing so chose to leave as more commitment was being needed. I’ve made contact with a few drummers to replace him but progress arranging a session together has been slow. I’m hopeful this week we’ll have a few guys to play with and start moving forward again.
Drummers contact me if you want to play.
Had another practice with the trio this week. It went very well, continued to work and progress ideas from our earlier session, which considering they are still in progress and changing actually sounded quite tight.We are learning more about how each other play and how we fit into the music being written. It’s all coming together now, we’ve got a good few songs now that we have the base arrangements and just need to tidy up and tighten up the playing. I’ll be working on some of these this week and trying to get some of the newer ideas into a basic format for the next session.
Nice to be able to write positive about this.
I had my first jam/practice with two new musicians on Thursday. I had a really good time. We worked on some stuff I had already written and they both really got what I was trying to play and put their own parts in. The tracks sounded so much better with a good drums and bass player, even that first play through was much more organic and rich sound, much fuller. We also worked through some tracks I’d started but hit a bit of a block on, on we turned around the bare bones in about 30 minutes, which considering I’d been stuck for about a month on it, was fantastic. We recorded the practice on the drummers iphone so we didn’t forget what we’d worked on. Yes, ok, I’m getting a little excited over one practice but it went so well, and with really talanted musicians and nice guys too I’m very much looking forward to our next run through, which won’t be a for a few weeks due to an absent member for a holiday. While I’m waiting I best get on with trying to put some more structure into the tracks we’ve worked on and work a little harder on the tracks we’ve not yet worked on.
I doubt they will read this, but my two new musician’s are Martyn (drums) and Brandon (bass) and I really had a good time and feel inspired again after playing with two quality musicians.
After splashing a little cash on some website and sending out some contacts to people in the area I had some really nice responses, mostly wanting to chat about playing some music and liking the idea’s I was pushing for a band.
I’ve got to sit down and type responses to them now to see who’s really interested, but its exciting to get a positive response (thanks to any who replied as I know some of you read this site) I hope to meet a few of you ASAP and see if there is anything we can do together.
Good positive post for once.
My recent posts have been all based around my musical work and my struggle to find the right people to play with. Not having the right people to play with can stifle the desire and skill of writing music, as no purpose makes you a bit slack, I’ve had to drop a few songs or ideas because I’d allowed myself to write sloppy or lazy parts.
This weekend I’ve taken a step forward, a friend who is a singer in band decided to part from his own band, one of the reasons I’ve never spoke to him about it. I’ve sounded him out about the project and he seemed interesting, great news. With a singer and front man who you know you can play with that’s a hard box ticked. I’ve also manged to track down the drummer I had lost due to a crappy musicians website, when I say tracked down, I’ve found a phone number which should belong to him, but he’s not got back to me yet. I’ve also decided to contact a known excellent bass player to do some session work and help me write proper bass lines for the tacks I’m working on. As I’m trying to put a 3 component band together for the music the bass line is a really core part and needs to be beyond what I can write, so hopefully he can help progress some of these songs to be ready to be played by a band.
Nothings done yet, but it does seem a lot more positive than it has been for a while in terms of working with other musicians.
If anyone is actually reading this blog they will know how hard I am finding it to find a regular musical flow. I’m writing music and songs left right and center but I am spanning this out over a crazy long period of time due to other commitments. This is not an ideal way to work. As I’ve got over an albums worth of songs now close to being finished but still in a fair state of flux, I thought I’d try to look at a different take on music. I’ve cleared down my ipod apart from a few key “must have” albums and chosen some of my lesser listened to and certainly lesser influenced music to see if it helps me finish some of the songs in progress but also maybe find a few new and different ones. It’s music inspired from my youth mostly, stuff that was fun to listen to in a pub or club but not much fun to play as a fast fingered long haired progressing guitarist, but may now give an older and better player a different avenue to look at.
I’ve also filled my normal ipod with a lot of music that I listen to on my gym ipod, this is stuff that I would never really play or listen to outside of te gym normally due to poor musical content, howver I’ve found that there can be some good hidden gems in there with interesting rythems and lyrical progression, I’ll probably delete these soon, but it’s certainly worth exploring.
