Jamalamadingdong

Back in late August I got a hit on my bandmix.com ad (where I was advertising myself as a noob bassist for hire) from a drummer who had a guitar player buddy.  It was reasonably local so I followed up with him and we arranged to meet on a Friday night.  I had emailed him asking what songs they played so they could give me something to be ready with when we got together, and I never really got a response on that.  Finally, the day before we were going to hook up, I got a response saying they really didn't do covers...it was mainly original stuff.

Well...yikes.  I didn't know how to feel about that, because without hearing any of their stuff beforehand I didn't know whether or not I'd be interested in playing with them.  Plus I wasn't sure if I had any creativity left in me for coming up with a bass line for someone else's song.  Or on the other hand, what if their previous bassist was leagues better than me and laid down some funky crap I couldn't duplicate?  So I began to beg off the project, but was persuaded to come out and meet these guys and hang out, see what happened.

Well, what happened was as we were warming up the guitarist started playing a riff he had come up with earlier in the day.  At that point the drummer and I started doing our thing, and 4 hours later we had a song written.  It was so wild.  I have very limited experience in bands, and even less experience with original material.  Yet the 3 of us clicked really well and we worked out the arrangement and riffs and all was good. 

So we got together again 2 weeks later (work schedules conflicting and so forth) and did some more work on the song, plus we recorded it for good measure.  Then they played live some of the other stuff they had, and to be honest I loved it.  Their music is very influenced by Maiden, old Sabbath and Priest, and stuff like that.  Nothing wrong with those influences!  So after that second meeting the drummer mixed up the rough recording of the song we came up with and emailed me a copy so I had something to play along with. 

Then this past week, before we got together this past Friday, the drummer emailed me and asked me how I felt about playing a short set at some point (like an hour) opening for this other band he played in?  Sure, sounds good.  So we got together Friday and went through the song we wrote and that was coming together pretty well.  Then they decided to teach me another one of their songs.  Basically the guitarist showed me what he was doing and as I learned the song I would try to add bits here and there, but mostly I was concerned with learning the structure of the song.  I could work out the fancy shit later if need be.  So they took a break but I kept working on the one part, and after the break we went through that song a couple more times and I felt pretty good playing it. 

So to make things more confusing for me, they decided to teach me another one of their songs.  We went part by part, and to be honest...ugh.  I was braindead.  I'd had a rough week at work and was drained and my brain was pretty much full.  But I learned all the parts of the song and did my best to play them in the right spots (lol, there were some moments I tell ya) with the plan to fine tune between our get-togethers.  So after we went through it a second time and I kept going to the wrong part out of this one change, I told them basically "sorry...I know what to play, I'm just struggling a little with when to play it.  But I'll get it."

Their response was basically that the way they saw it, they were thrilled with my playing.  We had gotten together exactly 3 times, and in those times I had helped write 1 song and learned 2 of their originals.  I guess when you put it like that, its been pretty productive.  We're also deciding on some covers to mix in with the originals.  I'd really like to do Megadeth's version of Anarchy (hey, I love playing that song...sue me) and Neil Young's Keep on Rockin' in the Free World.  Not sure what else they want to do, but whatever it is I'll learn it and we'll go from there.

But anyway, on top of work being super busy with quarter end and lots of crap going on there I've been really tied up learning these songs.  Well, I know how to play them...its just a matter of actually playing them.  They had recordings of both songs handy, the bass line added later by the drummer.  Whats funny is that after listening to the recording of the songs, we both came up with basically the same bass lines.  The one song is kind of fast and he played the bassline with a pick (cheater!), so I have to really work on my speed for that one since I use my fingers.  I've been changing a couple things around and doing some things with harmonics which I think sound cool, so we'll see what they think of it next time we get together.

So earlier when I blogged that I wasn't too worked up about my 360 dying, thats why...I hardly have time to play it anyway right now.