So we had our first rehearsal as a 3 piece. Our bass player, who was one of our guitar players at the music store, did very well. We now have a new song in our repertoire - Listen to the Music. We will probably drop "Heard it Through the Grapevine" since that was more of a piece to introduce the band and give everybody a solo opportunity. When we get a big enough setlist where that is warranted, maybe we'll bring it back, or do something similar with another song.

We also ran through the songs we knew from the music store and got through them well. So we have 4 solid songs!

I had setup patches in my Zoom G5 the night before, but apparently I didn't save them because they weren't there last night :-(. As a result, I wasn't really happy with my tone. Part of the learning process...I'll have to figure out what went wrong there.

China Grove will be put to the side at the moment since it was determined that we are too heavy on Doobie Brothers songs. It's too bad because that is a really rockin' fun song to play. I still learned how to play it, so you can't take that away from me :-).

Our drummer's husband is trying to help us out by trying to incorporate his band into our gigs. One problem is his band is a vocal group that sings over MIDI tracks. The other related problem is a genre gap. I informed them today that I appreciate the offer, but I really think it would be best for us to perform an opening set rather than "sit in" with his group for the opening songs. If the others want to do it, I will step aside...it bothers me that much. I feel like it wouldn't be "us" because of the song selection and because we would be accompanying a MIDI track. They are so used to singing with the MIDI tracks that they insist on incorporating that even though we would be playing.

So we'll see what happens there. It really bothered me, more than I thought it would, so I figured it was best to get it out there now so people don't get dissapointed later.

I'm hoping he'll agree that we could be their opening act. If we could borrow one of the singers to be our lead singer for our set, that would be cool...at least it would be our thing. Even better would be if we get our own singer by then. It's not until August, so we still have time to find somebody.

So yes, we are still in search of a singer. I figure that should be easier to find than a bass player. We had the idea of scouting at open mics and karaoke nights. The issue there is time and these things run late on a week night. I should have gone on this endeavor when I was single with no kids and had all of the time in the world :-).

Now we need to figure out what songs to work on next. We need to find songs that each of us like and are within all of our playing abilities. La Grange was suggested, but I said that would take me at least a month to get down to my satisfaction. Santana songs require too much instrumentation... We'll find something...

So at the moment I feel we are stalling a bit. Hopefully we can get some focus on songs to add to our repertiore as we search for our singer. I also hope we can all agree on the opening act vs. backing band idea.

Until next week...