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As for "when am I ready?" You'll never be ready. It works in reverse, you become ready by doing it. - pmbomb
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
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You can have version with or without vocals and any of the instruments missing and change key. Quick way to get something to play along with.
As for "when am I ready?" You'll never be ready. It works in reverse, you become ready by doing it. - pmbomb
As for "when am I ready?" You'll never be ready. It works in reverse, you become ready by doing it. - pmbomb
We put a mobile phone that had a metronome app through the mixing desk at the rehearsal room.
Once we had the demos we started shopping out drummers and as it turned out there are a few guys who do exactly that...take a demo as a reference and produce a fully recorded drum track. Given our time and location constraints, we mostly worked remotely and didn't put a huge focus on playing live...I realized how rare it is to get a visit from the muse for songwriting so I just encouraged him to keep producing tracks and I focused on trying to make them sound viable in a mix for a prospective drummer. It was an experiment with very low expectations but yielded quite satisfying results.
These were all produced without a drummer: https://soundcloud.com/meanwhileincalifornia
When we rehearsed it to see what we could do live...we would have been happy with Ableton live driving the drum tracks via foot triggers until we could find a drummer.
Unfortunately really good human drummers seem to be quite hard to come by, so more often than not I seem to find myself dealing with a drummer who is too loud/speeds up/slows down/gets lost. I often find myself thinking it would so much easier with the machine.
When rehearsing a blues band a few years ago, we replaced the drummer with a drum machine on the nights he couldn't make it. We found that we needed just two 1-bar patterns to cover every some we played
R.
Eqd Speaker Cranker clone
Monte Allums TR-2 Plus mod kit
Trading feedback: http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/60602/
As for "when am I ready?" You'll never be ready. It works in reverse, you become ready by doing it. - pmbomb
One of the problems that can occur is that one (hopefully just one max) person turns up to rehearsals to learn the songs rather than doing homework. IMHO it's the guitar and bass parts that need working on. The drummer should be able to pick things up fast. You can then rehearse with the singer with a fairly stable noise. It might be an idea to have a couple of sessions with the bass player. Bass and guitar on point makes it a lot easier.
Next up...
The vocalist picks the songs. I left a band that was on a tight time frame to learn a lot of male orientated songs with a female singer who didnt choose them. I learnt all the songs in the original key...
In my band the compromise is that the singer picks the songs with an eye on them not being boring or too difficult to play and the rest of the band can veto a song if hated. Big point on choice, it's the audience that drives what covers are played. I left a band that had Smoke on the Water and Stairway to Heaven on the set as the local audiences were stuck in a classic rock timewarp.
And..
The drummer has to be good and you have to not accept a dodgy one for convenience. I was lucky, a family friend was looking to play after a 10 year gap. I knew he was good back in the day and he just keeps getting better as he approaches where he was. I started a song with a loop and turned it off. As an experiment I turned the looper back on at the end of the song, dead on...
The drummer in my originals band 20 years ago had a light metronome which just lit up for a bar. He wrote down all the (agreed) bpms and clicked the right times every time.
Finally
Dialogue/communication/magic-whatever you call it, some musicians and some combinations of musicians have that certain something. I see local cover bands that stand there looking bored and it's competent but it doesnt move me. Work on getting that magic going. Look for things like dynamics that just happen, everyone stops at once without planning it. It's that intuition that really makes a band fun. It doesnt always happen naturally and sometimes it just doesnt happen but if you see the signs work on it.
Perfect.
R.
Eqd Speaker Cranker clone
Monte Allums TR-2 Plus mod kit
Trading feedback: http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/60602/