She slices, she dices, she plays BASS too!

I must say i held down the bassline on "Holy Roller Novocaine" much better than i thought i would. We had the school to ourselves and goofed off for over 5 hours...just the four of us and a lot of beer. Hella fun, but my fingers burn!

I can't help but feel like I've been somehow 'demoted' to bass because I'm not as good at guitar, but we do need it, i have one, and I just proved i could do it ok (at least with a simple bassline).

We had me turned up LOUD so the drummer could hear me over himself and our Lead said it was really cool, that most bands hide the bass and it's hard to hear. But at least that one song the bass really is alot of the song... so it was cool and i must admit my cheap bass sounds much better through that huge amp and cab than it does in my little guitar amp at home (next on the to-buy list... small bass amp).

Weee! Last Minute Jam!!

So, A emailed on Monday evening and said he was going to be in town and had time if we could get together enough people for a jam. Much frantic scrambling and furiously flying facebook messages ensued, who, when and what did we want to try and play.... By Tuesday afternoon we'd gotten several people together and secured the use of the school. Jam time got set for 7pm so i went home to feed the masses first and buy some beer (since they'd said we could bring some because it wasn't a "school" function).

We'd tossed "Big Yellow Taxi" out as a last minute idea Monday night so we tackled that first...refined that a bit, tried some of the older stuff again, had fun with it, mangled "So What" w/o a bass player, did "Big Yellow Taxi" as a punk song... which actually sounded better :-) and then Mark called out three chords and we jammed on them while he made up lyrics. It got a little raunchy, which was fun, and we had fun with things like 'hold on D, 2, 3,4' and goofing off trying to look like rock stars while we did it. Then 'back to A, 2, 3, 4' and we'd go back to the chord progression.... hella fun!

Got a little too tipsy to try anything new again, played "Rockin in the Free World" (which i almost tried as barre chords) went back to "Big Yellow Taxi" and polished it a bit as a faster, punker song because we liked that version better (I need to add the 'ohh, bop, bop's to the lyric sheet though because i backstrum them and i miss it if she doesn't sing it). We've decided to try and get together once a month or so, practice, jam, and toss in new stuff that we can work on during the next month. We put together a facebook group so it's easier to stay in touch and post ideas and TAB and shit. So for right now, "Supah Sweet" is back together :-)

Whew! Moving again...

Working on some stuff that actually almost sounds like it will be something soon.... Match has me using my barre chords in "1985" and "Rockin in the Free World". Slow and awkward, but at least a different way to look at those songs and practice the barre chords. And I'm messing with parts of Matt Nathanson - Come On Get Higher and Layla myself, just dicking around.

Starting to click...

Barre chords!

I can swing into the F barre fairly easily and then down two it's G, two more, A, two more B, then one to C, two to D and there it gets harder....I thought barring farther down would be easier but it's harder to get it to ring...your fingers have to be really clean because they're so close together. It's cool to be able to move them around a bit now, and i like the string-squeaks. Match lent me a new book to try some stuff from: Intermediate!! Way cool!

Joshua and I get to play tonight!

We're playing drums at the Community Rhythmcircle downtown tonight. Joshua is all excited but I'm nervous. I know though from playing at the lessons that i can pull it off, even if all i play is a simpler under-beat but I'm still nervous. It's like 30 people. But I so miss playing in a group, it'll be fun.

Just more life...

I feel uninspired with the guitar right now, but I could just be stuck there again, it may pass. Been working on the same stuff too long i think. The Little and I have been taking some drumming lessons together, learning hand-drumming on a djembe. It’s fun, and the instructor is really cool and Little is enjoying the time with me. I can see that learning some rhythm will help my guitar, and from playing with the band I already know how to shift my attention around in a group to find the beat if I lose it. Little is pretty good, he must get his rhythm from Daddy. I’m learning, slowly but I can find a simpler beat inside the complex ones and just improvise.

And today at work I attempted to play along with "Abracadabra" (which i had looked up and printed chords for weeks ago) and I didn't do too bad, and the strumming just kinda came out the right way from listening to it... it was cool. I'll have to work on that one a bit more.

Woot! I get to play today!

There's a party at the home of the Rhythm Fire teachers... they have a friends band, and then the staff band, and then us Karaoke players (students) get to play a few songs. It'll be fun (I hope) even though i haven't played much RF material in months. I'm being all nervous and anxious though... going by myself, that makes me anxious enough.

UPDATE: Well, I only got to play one song... the other bands got started late and were having too much fun so us 'kids' got on too late. But... it was a lot of fun, and there was a lot of talk about getting the group back together again. The pictures didn't turn out so great because it was pretty darn dark by the time we got a turn. Playing in the dark is hard, i'm used to being able to see my fingers :-) The torches were cool, but we were all having a hard time reading the lyric sheet and seeing what we were doing.

And i did ok with walking in by myself, i waited for someone else and walked in with him... turned out to be R... he'd shaved and I didn't recognize him w/o his beard. It was his going-away party. He's moving back to Florida. Sucks, he was a good teacher.

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Hmmm, should I or not?

One of the guys from Outlaw Drummers invited me to come down to open mic night and play with them....not sure if he means it or not. I told him i was a total beginner and he said they could use a beginner guitar...part of me wants to try, but i know i'd be embarrassed if i was too beginner to pull it off.

New Stuff

Match and I are working on "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" and "Desperado". Learning some new chords in "Desperado" and new strumming/picking stuff with "Flowers".

"Old Time Rock and Roll" is on my list to try next week, as well as "Hey There Delilah" (which i sent him my tab for).

Ha, ha

I finally tried a guitar in a store... LOL cause it was a cheap Starcaster in Best Buy and no one could hear me... but it was fun.

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It hurts anyway

The adult night is on indefinite hold now, there aren't enough paying people to make it worth while. I knew it was coming but it still feels a bit like being broken up with. My first band, that wasn't even really technically a band, has broken up. I'm trying not to cry. I really enjoyed hanging out with the other grown-ups and playing music with them. Just being able to get away for an evening and be an adult and talk music was cool enough. It's been so depressing to have to just go home the last few weeks. But I still have my private lessons and this week in addition to the fingerpicking piece from last week I'm supposed to tackle barre chords in the form of "Smoke On The Water". Yeah, that won't drive the kids nuts. :-)

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Hmmm

Lilly, my acoustic-electric.

CCR and other things

No jam tonight because there weren't enough people... spring break and all that...so all i had was my private lesson. Kind of a letdown, but the Little has had half days this week and the Big One full days, so I've spent a fair amount of time practicing. Nice to just sit on the couch with the acoustic/electric anyway. She's alot of fun, and really sounds nice with the classical piece Match had me doing this week. I practiced that, and "Hey Jude", and "Bad Moon Rising" (for RF). I'm getting the CCR song pretty good now. The struming pattern took a bit but i found some guy online who made it easy enough and just kept trying. So I have another week to practice those, and The Doors "Love Her Madly" before we play again. It's almost better, but i really miss playing.

Hmm, not so cool

It's always fun when we pull off something I've never played before at practice, but then sometimes i come home and try to do it at home and it sounds horrible.
We played CCR's "Bad Moon Rising" and did a fairly decent job the second time through... and then i tried to play it this morning and it was awful. Maybe i was a bit out of tune, i didn't have time to check, i was headed out the door, but it was frustrating. It sounded so good Wed night when we played it. Made me wonder if I'm worse than i think. Still doing more of a jam night and i really enjoy it. Tried to play the Pink Floyd song and couldn't pull it together with the new guy so it sounded right. For some reason it felt like one of my strings wasn't ringing right. Maybe i was hearing wrong, that happens sometimes, and we've just changed my depression meds and added something new for the fibromyalgia that i think is making me a bit foggy. The good news is I found my favorite pick this morning when i put my pants on :-) Oh, and we did "Folsom Prison Blues" and new guy tried showing off by making it faster (maybe because i was finger-picking it) and i kept right up. Had to spit my pick out onto the floor because I'd put it in my mouth when we started and i needed to concentrate (no time to grab it). That was funny. He seemed mildly impressed that I kept up. I was impressed too. Maybe more so than him. LOL

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More coolness

I played "Driving My Life Away" this morning... played it on the air the other day, decided it couldn't be too hard unless the chords were weird, and looked up chords last night and just tried it this morning. Most of it's the rhythm. It didn't sound too bad for the first time through on a song I'd never done before. And I was ungodly tickled that I could do it :-)
----------------
Oh, and I tackled Hey Jude for my private lesson and figured out i had to capo at the 3rd fret to get it to sound the same as the recording :-)
Now playing: Eddie Rabbit - Drivin My Life Away via FoxyTunes

Know what's cool?

..didn't i ask that already in another post? :-)

It's really freakin cool when I play with the whole band and I'm not the only guitar and i can't pick out my own sound in the room. Knowing that I'm good enough with the chords that I don't stand out. We tried several Beatles songs this week that this weeks new person knew... and 'Hard Days Night' wasn't too hard. The other two we kind of mangled a bit but the girls sang enthusiastically over us. Some of them i can even sing along with although I'd never dare to do it near an hot mic.

And I'm going to have to miss next week because of a mandatory rehearsal for work and I'm not a happy camper. I'm stomping around the studio being pissy because i dont want to miss practice! I really look forward to it every week and i dont want to get behind if i miss a week.

Yeah i know i havent missed a week since i started in Sept but this annoys me so i'm pouting. It's damn important to me and i really missed it last week when everyone was sick. If they had any idea how much playing in this band held me together during the winter and what i would have been like w/o it they wouldn't dare! So now this news has killed the high i was on when i came in this morning from playing Beatles for 2 hours with the band last night. :::grumble:::

It's also really cool to hear your hubby tell a friend "she plays in a band" :-)

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Capital City Guitars

Dude called today to say it was done and he fixed some electrical problems too. He fixed or replaced my selector switch so the middle PU works now, restrung it (neatly) with EB's again, cleaned and polished it and set the intonation (eliminating alot of the low E fret buzz) and lowered the action a bit with the new (handmade) bone nut. It sounds much less twangy with the mid PU working. I'm a happy camper and he only charged me $45. So here's another pic of the two hanging out at home.

Fuck!

I tried to restring my electric myself (I've done it once with supervision) with some nice Gretch strings i bought myself for Christmas and broke the fucking nut! (you know, the bar at the top that holds the strings in line). I guess it was plastic and i wound the string wrong and it pulled too hard :-( And I broke my it in front of Hubby, who was nice enough to not say anything but now i need to take it in after work, admit i broke it, and pay someone to fix it....and i cant even see how those nice Gretch strings sound! And because I'm on the air this week I can't take it till after work either :-( and i doubt they'll reuse the brand new strings.

I just wanna cry, it's something i should have been able to do myself w/o breaking anything, and it just had to be in front of hubby. At least all I broke on the new Acoustic/Electric was one of the strings (whew!) and i have a replacement. Oh, here's the new Ibanez Talman Acoustic-Electric I bought myself as a late Xmas gift.

Now you know what I've been up to :-) I've been watching craigslist for one for a while because I'd like to be able to play unplugged too. I wanted to stick with the thinner body and the electric shape because I'm used to that already. This little sweetie just happened to follow me home Friday. Cute isn't she? She was bummed about leaving her old person so i bought her that pink strap to cheer her up. She sounds really cool on my big amp too, more ballsy than my electric, especially if i adjust the equalizer to make her more bassy :-) Star (the electric) may be in the shop a few days so she may get to go to my lesson and to Rhythm Fire on Wednesday. I don't know how I'll explain her to hubby, he thinks I'm nuts enough and don't need any more guitars. I think maybe he doesn't need any more antennas either! I may just say she's a loaner from school.

I was the only one last night... so we talked and BS'd and looked stuff up on youtube...and it was fun to just be part of that, but i missed the thrill of playing. I kinda needed it this week. It's going to turn in to more of a jam night until there's more people again. i really hope the adult group doesn't fall apart, i really need it right now, it's kept me sane this winter. I've been working a bit on "Don't Speak" because the girls want to sing it so bad. Can do parts of it, not ready to tell them yet though. :-)

"key"

It still amazes me that we can start a song and the singers can ask for it in a different key and someone calls out different chords and we start again and it's the same song. And almost more amazing that i figured out it was two semi-tones up and managed to transpose the chords i found online to what we had played.

updates:

So, last time we played “So What” we got to the point where A usually does the solo-ish part and the whole dang band almost stopped and stared at each other. We really need a student Lead.. and I'm happy doing rhythm ::shrug:: I thought I'd try it anyway. This is what i got off UG:

e------------------------------------------------------------|
B---10----------10----------10-----------------------------|
G ----9--7--6----9--7--6------9--7--6--4--2--4--6---------|
D-----------------------------------------------Play--2x----|
A------------------------------------------------------------|
E------------------------------------------------------------|

But the 6-4-2-4-6 part sounds odd :-(

It's easy enough...I may just try it and surprise them next time we play it. I really wish I had someone to practice with...it's so different than practicing alone...but then i don't always turn the big amp on and practice right either.

We did practice "First Cut" enough to get it ironed out (mostly) The weird D/Dus/A riff comes at odd places and I still need to figure it all out but we got some simple strumming worked out. R ripped my Pink Floyd arrangement apart and it pissed me off but it was just me and him so I tried it his way too. We did a punk version of Free World at the end of the jam and it was a lot of fun, sometimes I wish we were recording, i couldn't hear the girls and was concentrating really hard on the chord changes because they came so fast. But it was hella fun to do :-)

My arm got messed up Sunday night and i ended up at the ER. To his credit hubby never once said i should quit guitar although he did wonder outloud if I'd practiced too much at work that day. I dunno if i could quit, although i do wonder how hard it would be to re-learn it left-handed. I'm not convinced it's the guitar that's triggering this though, the first few weeks @ RF my arm was sore because i'd never played that long but it hasn't been sore from that in a while and even though I’ve had trouble with it I can’t connect the two yet (can you tell i don't want to know if it is?) This time tests showed infection so maybe it's been some lingering thing that keeps coming back, it's so hard to tell. But OMG did it *hurt* this time... scary hurt.

I got parts of “Here Comes the Sun” down, hubby recognized it :-))) Need T (private lessons guy) to explain more of it to my fingers still. My tuner's being wack, needle swinging all over and it's not hooked to the guitar, glad i ordered a 9v supply, it and the pedals eat them. Got a book on capos in the mail today, should stop and go look at it. I've got the Fretboard Logic book coming too, found a used copy and know i can eBay it for what i paid if it doesn't make sense to me. So before I stop practicing tonight tell me, why in this run:
e ||---------|--------0--------0--------|--0--------------||
B||---------|-----3--------3--------3--|-----3--2--0-----||
G||-----2/-|--4--------2--------0----|--------------2--||
D||---------|--------------------------|------------------||
A||---------|--------------------------|------------------||
E||---------|--------------------------|------------------||
can i manage to not look at my fingers until the 3-2-0 part on the B string? Then i second-guess myself and look and mess up! Argh! LOL

Know what's cool?

We were playing with the Pink Floyd song again and I was able to pick out some chords that worked under the solo parts and even modify one that sounded good to make it flow into the next chord smoother :-))

We were doing G-Em-G-Em-G-A and then i changed from A to A7 because it sounded better to me coming back into G. Tyler could probly explain to me why it flows better that way, but for now I'm just tickled that I'm learning to hear some of the stuff I wouldn't hear before. The words 'listen to the song for the strumming' no longer totally defeat me. I'm quite proud of my accomplishments right now.

I pretty much have the song arranged for two guitars now and i just have to get up to speed on the solo part if I want to be the one doing it at a show.

I just jumped in!

Had R to myself this week and we worked on Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here because I'm working on it at home and Yellow Submarine and Duffy's Mercy. And fiddled a bit with Groove is in The Heart. Just kinda wandered through them, didn't really play the whole thing.

After the lessons part was over and we went downstairs we jammed on a Chicago song that i think was "25 or 6 to 4" to warm up, and someone sang the Pink Floyd song while i played it while we waited for the singers to come down. We played Squeezebox, Mercy, What's Up and closed with Rockin in the Free World. I can't believe i just jumped into the jam though, watched the bass player for a simple base line and then just jumped in! It was a bit chaotic but not in a bad way. We got T shirts this week too! Pretty cool.

Hey, let's try ____!

We almost thought it was going to be just me for a while there this week, both drummers and a teacher couldn't get there because of flooding. But the girls showed up and then B, but he didn't have his guitar and he didn't feel right to me (damn empathicness). Turns out he just came for his amp, his deployment's been moved up from March to February and he's going to go spend time visiting family before he leaves. He’ll be gone 14mo. So all us girls had to hug him and most of the guys walked out to the car with him and did whatever it is guys do when they want to say "Hey i care about you, stay safe buddy" and then we played "Squeezebox" several times to warm up. Teacher on drums, one of the girls on bass and the bass teacher playing the crappy Squire (that was funny). Messed around with it, turned it slightly reggae for a bit, (didn’t sound too bad that way), then played "Free Fallin" about 3 times and dicked around with extending that one too.

They talked me into playing "Some Kind of Wonderful" with the bass teacher calling chord changes for me since i was the only 6 string... (I was reluctant because I'd be the only guitar and i don't know the song well...but it went better than i thought it would with me on lead). We messed around for a bit and then it was "hey let's try _____ it's only 3 chords". Someone brought the laptop down and we played 4 NonBlonde's "What's Up" and DeLites' "Groove Is In The Heart" (two chords for me, teacher on the bass line and another on keys). It was funny after that time with him telling us we shouldn't use my chord charts to see him and the girls huddled around the laptop though. Sometimes the changes in players is fun and sometimes it’s unsettling. We had me, the girls, and three teachers… pretty much only me and the bass teacher on guitar this week, but we did make it work better than I thought it would. A is taking a break and B will be gone for over a year. I’m going to have to deal with the fact that this is more of a jam session than a working band situation, people are going to come and go.

Never in my wildest dreams did i ever think I'd be able to stand in with a band, have someone say "hey, let's try ____ it's G, Am and C ... 2, 3, 4 go!" and be able to pull it off well enough for the vocalists to sing it. I never dreamed that I'd ever be able to make music at all and this has been simply amazing, and they told me last night that they've had several calls from moms about kids' lessons from our ads and have had a few new kids start already. They're really happy with the trade too. I come home from every practice just amazed.