I gave it one more go at trying to help him play in the right key. He threw a wobbly about me being bitter for leaving the band. I'm glad he left. The feedback we get is that we're better without him.
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Players that won't learn a note
- Thread starter themickster
- Start date
The mistake I see here is that many bands want to play shows when they aren’t ready. Butchering a solo on stage shouldn’t happen but it requires a degree of self awareness to hang back and admit it’s not good enough for an audience yet.
The more time you spend on a song, the more you’re apt to run up against the sunk-cost fallacy where someone will start pushing to perform a song that isn’t ready because of the time spent on it. I’m dealing with this in one band right now.
He'd played the song quite a bit before. They were a three-piece before I joined, but he always played rhythm. Poorly.
By having me join, the band gained a lot of melody because I was playing around a bit, filling gaps and such. I figured the solo for this particular song is so easy, I wouldn't mind playing it on bass. This made him feel threatened (which I understand in hindsight, but which wasn't my intention at the time) so he tried - and failed.
The vocalist was really good at working a crowd. Really good. And the drummer was more than okay. Biggest mistake of my playing years was convincing the guitarist to stay, after a particularly bad gig. It killed the band a few months later.
But anyway, he was one player who would not only NOT learn songs note for note. He'd skip chords or simplify em. Made my life way harder. Or should I say, more interesting?
Sadly there are lots of people out there like this. I've run across more than my share, and all I can say is it's best to move on because they won't listen and they won't learn. And they're an embarrassment to everyone else who shares a stage with them.
Some guitar solos are really hard. I'm thinking My Sharona, as an example of a really long and difficult lead guitar part. I sympathize with the work involved; not everyone who's capable will take something like that on.
I've had two incidents with this particular band where a lot of time was spent on difficult songs that just did not come together well. It happens, but when the band doesn't groove and the work to get there seems difficult or even impossible, you sometimes have to cut your losses.
I always ask myself how much more we could be accomplishing if we redirect that effort toward something more achievable. This isn't a band that won't challenge itself; we do that all the time, but even though we can handle complex material, some things just don't work because the instrumentation isn't right and the elusive groove doesn't happen, or they can't come together on important timing issues and set themselves up for a trainwreck - in one case the drummer needed to count because he's transitioning between odd time and even time, and the singer wanted to vamp and cue vocally over that instead and won't count, and the ending fails because the drummer can't pick up the cue fast enough to change things up on the fly like that. After several weeks of them trying to get that together after I'd counted it all out for them along with the record and told everyone they need to count it, I pulled the plug.
They were mad about it but it was never going to work.
I empathize when people want to do something because they've put a lot of time into it, but once it's clear that there's nothing to be gained by continuing to work on it, I don't want people wasting their time.
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You're right, but we don't always see how bad things are whilst we're in them. The worst case is the abuse victims that give endless loyalty to the abuser.
There were two songs in my band that I was messing up the bassline to again and again. The mess-ups were always when there was some lead guitar. As soon as the guitarist left, I started getting them right every time. He's the kind that won't make up one break for a song and keep to it. Worse still, he plays in whatever key strays too near to his overgrown self-worth. It's only now that I'm hearing how bad his playing is, and he's getting more and more known for it.
To me that's a great example of a song with an iconic solo that should be plated N4N.
The best band I was ever in (over ten years ago, I never got back to that level) would try new songs for max two rehearsals. Didn't matter how much (or little) time we'd spent working things out (cos we sometimes picked challenging songs), if it didn't work, we'd kill it. Same if the singer said he could not reach the high notes (we already tuned down a semitone). He had to carry it so if he couldn't get there, it'd get scrapped. Plenty good songs out there to choose from.
What I would is just don't do that song. There are lots if songs to cover. Doing, or not doing, sny one particular song isn't going to make, or break, a band.
I'd never listened to that break before. Thank you for drawing me to it.
I'll go with that. My last guitarist would play twiddly twiddling all the way through it, even the verses, and in the wrong key.
When the topic of "feral" jazz musicians comes up, I immediately think of this early Louis Armstrong cut. To my ear, the influence of classical music on his playing here is undeniable.
Of course. But we did do it in a former band, and the guitarist actually did a good job. But learning it was a ***** I'm sure.
I was at a blues jam in Issaquah, Wa where this young guitar player wanted to get a bunch of us to play an original he'd written. He couldn't tell us which chords or anything. We said no thanks.
Life's too short to share these folks' self inflicted misery.
Life's too short to share these folks' self inflicted misery.
I played a gig once with the band I was in at the time. The gig was for a local hospital staff. They hired us but they also hired a special guest artist who would be playing with us. He was/is a good player who is well known locally. He started his part of the show with one of his original songs, which none of us but the drummer had ever heard...AND he started acapello AND he didn't even play guitar on it. Talks about a train wreck. We didn't know the key, changes or anything.
