Instrumentaly speaking, you are a trio, not a 4pc. There are 4 of you but only 3 instruments. Problem with trios is that when the rhythm guitar becomes the lead guitar, there is often a huge hole in the music because you and the drummer are now the totality of the rhythm section and there is no chord support from a rhythm guitar or keyboards. So it leaves a hole in the sound. Your mission, and it IS YOUR MISSION is to fill in enough with your bass playing that the hole in the sound is not noticeable. Often this means you need to get busy when the lead gets on it, but you don't want to detract from the lead.Not sure where to post this so mods, please move if in the wrong section.
Anyway, I'm in a standard 4-piece band (singer, guitar, drums, me on bass) and we're doing mainly covers. We have been tossing around the idea of adding "Black" by Pearl Jam to our set, and this being a song originally by a 5-piece band, I've always thought that the arrangement was pretty big sounding; I'm worried that with having only one guitarist, if we take on this song it may sound a little sparse. Getting someone else to play guitar with us would be hard as we would have to find someone and fit them in before a gig we have in about a week, and since they would play only on this one song, it would be highly impractical. Does anyone have any suggestions for how we can tweak our playing/arrangement of the song to fill the space better? Granted, we haven't rehearsed this song yet but I have a feeling this may be an issue as we have a similar problem during the guitar solo section of "Hotel California."
P.S. I am the one who suggested this song, as we all have pretty equal says on what goes. Me and the guitarist really want to do this tune and the rest of the band are down, so I would appreciate it if people held off with the "just pick another song" type responses, thanks. If it really does not sound good, we will drop the song anyway haha.
A simple option is to just do songs that trios originally played - folks such as Cream or Led Zeppelin (another 4-member group with 3 instruments). That's pretty limiting though. A lot of those songs have specific riffs that are shared by bot bass and guitar, and are very recognizable. As long as those riffs continue to happen, the lead can go about his merry way without leaving a big hole in the music. I play with a 4-pc band that used to be 5-pc, and also with a trio. The trio is a blues rock trio and it works pretty well. Missing our second guitar in the 5-pc group loses a lot of the fills and nice little pieces that a second guitarist adds, but our keyboards keeps us from having a hole in the music when the lead guitarist starts doing a lead. So adding that one more instrument makes this much easier to do.
For now, it just sounds like you are going to need to get busy to fill the hole as best as you can. You may have to realize that your current mix of instruments doesn't really allow you to play all the songs you might like.
