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sspadowsky sspadowsky is offline
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Old Feb 14th, 2005, 02:56 PM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronnie Raygun
"Musicians are, by nature, thieves. What we know, write, and play, is nothing more than a composite of what other artists have done." - Spad

Sometimes that can be really shitty when you have no creativity of your own but I think it's important to learn from what other people have done and improve yourself...
Exactly.
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About ten years ago, my old band was playing its second show ever. Due to a major fiasco that's a whole story in itself, we shitcanned our original drummer before we ever played our first show. Due to our first show going well, despite having a fill-in drummer, we were offered another gig at the same club. However, we had to find another guy to fill in on drums. So, through a friend, we found a guy who was an excellent drummer.

And he knew he was excellent. So much so, in fact, that he didn't feel compelled to show up for most of the rehearsals.

So, did we cancel the show and wait until we found a permanent guy? Of course not.

We go over the songs pretty thoroughly with the drummer a few days before the show, and it seems to go OK. We're pretty sure we can pull it off.

Showtime. The first few songs go fine. But my throat is getting pretty dry after about the fourth song, and I can't find my water. Still, we press on. The next song contains a pretty high note, which I can hit when my throat is not like the Mojave. I go for it. It comes out sounding like someone punched me in the throat. There's no way to disguise it.

Everything falls apart after that. The drummer starts forgetting shit. The other guitar player hits 'bypass' on his effects unit, so a heavy metal song now sounds like it's 'MTV Unplugged.'

On the last song, which is a pretty quick number with a lot of double bass, things go to hell quickly. We open strong, but when it gets to the first verse, the drummer breaks into this weird, slow kind of shuffle beat (the beat and tempo are not supposed to change). It's challenging to sing and play guitar at the same time under normal circumstances, but now I'm trying to do it while playing out-of-time and panicking like hell.

We manage to make it through the verse, and I turn around and start screaming at the drummer, "FOUR-FOUR! FOUR-FOUR!" He looks at me for a moment like I'm speaking Japanese, and then he figures it out and gets back to the right beat.

Toward the end of the song, it's supposed to break down to just a bass line. I visually cue the drummer, and rather than smoothly roll into it, we grind to a screeching halt. Our bass player, completely lost, hits one lonely, tentative note: *THUNK*

We get the hell off the stage as quickly as possible.

Thank you, and good night.
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