For those that might be following my saga...
Tonight is our second practice. It was pretty amazing how much progress we were able to make in just 1 hour with "Wild Night". Even though I didn't touch the song for almost a week, I now have the song committed to memory. We never got to the solo part. We'll see how that goes. I wasn't totally happy with what I came up with improvising...we'll see what they think.
Our next song that we will start practicing tonight is the Black Crowes version of "Hard to Handle". I could only start working on that last night so I haven't been able to get a handle on the solo. It's a fun song to play with some rhythmic goodness! It will be interesting to see how we can pull it off as a band.
An unexpected frustration is not being able to hear what I'm playing. I had the same problem when I played acoustic guitar in the church choir, but that was understandable. Hopefully tonight we can get that sorted out. I understand the guitars shouldn't be overwhelming, but I should be able to hear what I'm playing. I either need to turn my volume up or have a stage monitor.
Also, we didn't have time to just jam. To me, that's a great way to have fun and get to know eachother musically. Our mentor didn't seem to have any interest in having us jam for a bit.
Our mentor is doing a great job of helping us work through the song as a band, helping us work out everything section by section. It's good to have a 3rd party to do that. He was using a cowbell to help us keep time together. The "this song needs more cowbell" reference was lost on all but me...:-(.
One dissapointment is that there is very little intersection on the songs we know. Nobody is interested in playing any Beatles songs :-(. I could understand if they were younger than me, but they are all older! This makes the band feel disjointed...but this may change as time goes on. I'm still holding out hope for either "China Grove", "Listen to the Music", or "I Shot the Sheriff".
I solved the tuning problems on my Les Paul with some pencil lead dust on the nut, so tonight it's humbuckers. I have a better reach on this guitar, so it should be better all around.
