Cover bands: How much time do you spend rehearsing?

[Joe Nerve]

Some things I wanted to say in the OP, but it was getting a bit lengthy. Most of them have already been said by others.

I agree, that what's important is that everyone is on the same page. If everyone in the band WANTS to rehearse 4 times a week, then awesome. More power to you. My only point is that it's not necessary if playing with competent, experienced musicians. And that I'm willing to continue to argue .

I also think that there are bands that absolutely SHOULD practice once or more a week. As I said originally, I'm only referring to musicians who have been around a while. I believe those of us that don't have any trouble jumping in and playing tightly with others without rehearsing can only do so because at one time or another we paid our dues. The first cover band I was ever in rehearsed relentlessly, as did most of early original bands I was in. I've put in thousands of hours rehearsal time. It's important to learn to listen and play well with others. That doesn't happen sitting alone in one's bedroom playing along with mp3s. It happens by practicing with other musicians, and then it really gets driven home with gig time. If someone is new to the game, with less than 50 gigs under their belt, I think it would serve them and their audience well to spend time in the studio - while gigging, too.

The rant part of my post is again coming from my most recent failed attempt at earning some extra money with a cover band. And from something I hear too often around my parts. "We need to rehearse if we want to be a good a band." Again, I disagree. I laughed when I read someone's earlier post here because the same has been true for me. Bands I've played in that rehearsed a lot rarely ever gig, bands I've been in that gig a lot rarely ever rehearse. I'd rather play in 4-5 bands that gig all the time, than one that rehearses and rarely plays. And that's actually what I do. I don't even know how many bands I'm in right now, and I like it that way.

 

[SteveHeissner]

We rehearse new songs at sound check. Otherwise, everyone learns and practices the material on their own time. It's efficient.

 

[obimark]

Amen brother.

I probably shouldn't even post in this thread, but my one "regular (usually weekly) rehearsal" is more like a boy's night, similar to what some guys do for a weekly poker game. About 5:00 pm every Thursday, I plug in the crock pot full of cheezy/meaty dip that my wife prepared. "The guys", mostly people I've played with on-and-off since the 1980s, with the addition of guests (often horn players), show up about 7:00 pm. We have an hors d'oeuvre platter and nuts, sometimes pizza, open some adult beverages, and shoot the bull. Around 45 minutes later, we start playing mostly Real Book Jazz. We take turns calling the tunes, some familiar, some we've never played together before. If we have guest musicians, we encourage them to call the tunes. We just have a lot of fun. We eat, laugh, play a lot of cool tunes, and break up around 11:00 pm. This core of old regulars almost never leaves "the doghouse" to play in front of people. We've all had pretty much enough of that.

When I do play out, it's usually with people I don't know too well, playing songs I'm often unfamiliar with. I'm happy if they'll email me charts and mp3 or YouTube links, and I don't care if they're in the same key or the key I'll be performing the tunes in. I enjoy woodshedding the tunes, I will convert the charts to Nashville numbers because it helps me internalize the changes, go do usually one rehearsal with them, and then go play the gig.

This is how I like it now.

THat is a Jam night, and obviously everybody is on the same page and knows it is just for fun. All good.

That is different than people claiming to be a "working" cover band who are actually rehearsing the set list to play out but in reality have NO intention of playing out. Like many CLers have been known to do.
If I had time and I had good friends who played for fun, I'd have no issues with a monthly jam, provided they were good players and left room so I could play and hear my bass.

 

[FretNoMore]

I played with a guitarist a long time ago who was very keen on rehearsing, the more the better, but became very evading and antsy when we started talking about gigs. I think he was simply afraid of being on stage but liked playing music with friends in the basement a lot. Not everyone is comfortable with performing, but may still want to make music.

 

[smogg]

I personally have no interest being in a band that does not play out. That said; in my current cover band, when the gig schedule is heavy we don't rehearse. When it's light we get together as needed to bring in new material and get some hang time away from our wives. It works for us. As mentioned several times in this thread, if all are on the same page then it's all good.

 

[MegaSwing]

My main group tries to rehearse weekly just on GP, but it is not unusual to go a long period without regular rehearsals because of unpredictable personal and work schedules. We rehearse mostly to iron out new or less familiar material. The problem with only playing onstage is you get too comfortable with tried-and-true stuff and it becomes harder to expand the repertoire into more challenging and perhaps more satisfying areas.

However, a band that does common covers scarcely needs to rehearse. Most experienced players have been rehearsing THAT gig all their lives.

 

[interp]

My best experience on this point was a cover band I played in many years back. All good, experienced players. We rehearsed for the entire month of May, thinking to just play gigs over the summer. I ended up doing around 900 gigs with them over the next six years, and other than the first series of rehearsals I would say we rehearsed two or three times. And we usually learned 12-15 new tunes a month.

The key is maximum (individual) practice, minimum group rehearsal, and lots of performance.

 

[SteveHeissner]

The key is maximum (individual) practice, minimum group rehearsal, and lots of performance.

+1

 

[los100malditos]

I think they are. You posted asking a question, sorry if you don't like my answer.

I've been playing for over 40 years and I studied at Peabody Conservatory and North Carolina School of the Arts, if you can believe an anonymous voice on the internet. I know what I'm talking about.

However, if you are happy with what you are doing, it's not my place to criticize or offer suggestions, just as I'm not interested in criticism or suggestions from people of unknown qualifications.

Look, I'm not trying to be a dick here, but you posted a question, "How much do you rehearse? And why?" I answered it and now you're arguing with me. You have your standards and I have mine.

Good luck, I hope you have a great career and are able to avoid projects that rehearse more than you want to.

+1

 

[los100malditos]

I think they are. You posted asking a question, sorry if you don't like my answer.

I've been playing for over 40 years and I studied at Peabody Conservatory and North Carolina School of the Arts, if you can believe an anonymous voice on the internet. I know what I'm talking about.

However, if you are happy with what you are doing, it's not my place to criticize or offer suggestions, just as I'm not interested in criticism or suggestions from people of unknown qualifications.

Look, I'm not trying to be a dick here, but you posted a question, "How much do you rehearse? And why?" I answered it and now you're arguing with me. You have your standards and I have mine.

Good luck, I hope you have a great career and are able to avoid projects that rehearse more than you want to.

+1

 

[rtslinger]

Homework, never a band rehearsal in 11 years In fact I do not see any of my band mates until the night of the show, just text and email to stay on top of things

 

[Gearhead17]

No rehearsing? I was with a band for 7 years and we rehearsed once a week on average. For the most part, I needed it for the first year since I had never played with a drummer/band. Nor had I ever focused hard enough to memorize a song. It really helped me out. As time went on, my bandmates were constantly changing song structures, changing up fills, transposing keyboard parts to guitar/bass, tuning down for certain songs, and coming up with other crazy ideas. When you cover an electronic dance tune with no backing tracks and are combining it with another dance tune – yeah, a little rehearsing is needed.

I find it hard to believe that so many of you can jump on stage and "trust" the band to play EXACTLY like the original. I must be terrible at playing on the "fly" or "in the moment", but when a drummer is playing a laid back song with a punk feel, skipping the fills, adding new fills, doing an erratic bass drum pattern, it gets harder to play along with him. Every drummer I have played with has added their own way of doing a cover song. I have learned over time that you have to do the best you can at that moment. Of course, someone will say, "you need to play with more professional drummers". And I will reply, figure out how to remove ego's from drummers and then we will get somewhere….

For me, rehearsals were a time to figure out how the drummer was going to interpret the song. More importantly, how the BAND was going to interpret the song. In the end, my cover band created some interesting versions of dance tunes, gave pop tunes a rock edge and really injected a lot of creativity in a live setting.

For those of you that can just show up and play, more power to you.

 

[drummer5359]

I'm retired from the day job, music is all that I do these days and it keeps me happy and busy. Currently I am involved with four separate projects. Practice requirements vary greatly.


One of the cover bands will rehearse twice a month when things are slow to stay sharp. In the summer when it gets busy we don't need to rehearse at all.

When we do rehearse we spend an hour or so hashing out new tunes, then we will take one set and play it straight through as we would at a gig. It is just a way to stay sharp and it's also nice to hang with the guys away from a gig every one in a while.

I'm in another cover band that is pretty new. All of us are experienced players, we still practice twice a month, mainly to increase our repertoire.

The third cover project is an acoustic duo. We've been gigging together for four and a half years, I think that we might have practiced together twice. Once was before our first gig together and another time was when he and his wife stopped by to visit. He and I went down in the rehearsal room and worked out a couple of new arrangements. We are both experienced and communicate well on stage, it works.

Lastly, I'm in an original projects that's been going on a few years. We never practice together anymore. The songwriter will send a note with a rough demo of a new song. We prepare separately and nail it the first time.

 

[lfmn16]

I find it hard to believe that so many of you can jump on stage and "trust" the band to play EXACTLY like the original.

It doesn't IMHO.

I've been in these situations and if everyone knows the song there are no trainwrecks, a limited number of clams and no one in the audience knows that you've never played together before. However, everyone is watching everyone during intros, endings and changes. It's not usually very tight and the vocals are usually the weak link. I'm not making judgments, I've done it myself, but I think people are fooling themselves when they think they can step into these type of situations for the first time and have everything spot on. I'm not talking about people that have worked together for years.

When I talk about tight, I'm thinking of situations where everyone knows the material inside and out; everyone isn't looking at each other for cues; beginnings, endings and transitions are worked out; and you know the other people in the band so well that you know what fills they are going to play in most every situation. If anyone thinks they get to this level in one or two rehearsals, they are kidding themselves. This type of tightness only comes through playing together many times either rehearsal or gigs.

YMMV.

 

[FretNoMore]

^ This ...

I bet a lot of the bands that don't rehearse could sound better if they did, and that their performance can be a bit hesitant as no-one is quite sure what the others will play all the time. At a bare minimum I think you need to rehearse beginnings, endings, breaks as those will reveal how "untight" the band is.

 

[electracoyote]

Same band with a different drummer. Doing our own take on ticket to ride. If we rehearsed, we only rehearsed once. I enjoy this guy's old school guitar playing at around 2:08.

Doing your own take indeed. And I think that is an important part of the conversation. If you and your mates are okay with re-writing parts, leaving out harmonies, changing chord progressions, etc., and if your audience is okay with it, then more power to you. There is little reason to rehearse.

 

[lfmn16]

^ This ...

I bet a lot of the bands that don't rehearse could sound better if they did, and that their performance can be a bit hesitant as no-one is quite sure what the others will play all the time. At a bare minimum I think you need to rehearse beginnings, endings, breaks as those will reveal how "untight" the band is.

+1

I would so far as to say they can sound good if they are all good players and know the material.

 

[FretNoMore]

I would think at least new songs have to be rehearsed some time; we may just play through an old song once in a blue moon to keep it reasonably current so I guess you can say we don't rehearse everything all the time. What we tend to do before a gig is go through the set list, skip the songs we play a lot, play new songs all the way through, and play maybe intro+verse+solo+outro of songs we feel a bit unsure of. Just to refresh memories of key points in the songs so we don't have a drum fill where there should be a break, and so on.

 

[Joe Nerve]

I find it hard to believe that so many of you can jump on stage and "trust" the band to play EXACTLY like the original. I must be terrible at playing on the "fly" or "in the moment", but when a drummer is playing a laid back song with a punk feel, skipping the fills, adding new fills, doing an erratic bass drum pattern, it gets harder to play along with him. Every drummer I have played with has added their own way of doing a cover song. I have learned over time that you have to do the best you can at that moment.

Again, maybe I underestimate my own experience, but what you describe here makes it even more fun for me. Yes, drummers will add their own feel and fills at times (often actually), but if you're practiced at listening and feeling, it becomes like a dance. Teamwork. Making music together. The first live video I posted a few pages back was a perfect example. It was a slow tune where I had to pickup on what the drummer was doing in order to make my fills work with his. In the beginning of the song we're not entirely matched up, yet we stay simple and tight. By the final third we both started picking up on each other.

I think that's a skill that's developed through lots of jamming. And jamming is what I used to do lots of in all those bands I rehearsed in for all those years. It really helps sharpen the listening and improvisational skills. Locking in with the drummer and other members starts to become second nature, and not something one needs think about.

The guy in those live videos gave me tons of practice with that stuff too, as he was very old school about a lot of things. Would never follow a setlist, he'd start jams on a whim, change the arrangement of songs in the middle of them (I think he was actually just messing up)... It was a bit scary when I first started gigging with him, but I accepted it as a challenge and learned to have fun with it. He'd even call out and start playing songs he just assumed the band could pick up on. Started playing born to be wild during a mid song jam one time, calling out the chords to me. Thats the kind of stuff that's worth 15 rehearsals to me. Can't say I'm a huge fan of doing that though. Actually gave him a bit of hell for it. And then went home and learned born to be wild.

 

[arginator]

We try to rehearse once a week, for guy time just as much as rehearsal (we all have families). But we also go weeks without rehearsal because of busy schedules. Gigs usually go well because we're all experienced and do our homework. Many of our songs we've been playing for a long time so we don't even practice them. We use rehearsal to work kinks out of new material and to fix any flubs from last gig.

Having said all that, I do think regular practice is important, especially if your band does difficult material. How often you practice is up to you. I hate it when bands who think they're rock stars get up there, play terribly, and don't even realize it. OK, the average drunken bar patron usually doesn't notice. But personally, my band tries to act and sound professionally, so we practice regularly.