Anyone gigging?

[Robert]

Anyone doin any gigging these days? I have 2 next week with my friend www.jaronrovensky.com and a few more in August. Then I am starting a band with my friends Myra and Kris (hopefully) and we are have auditions for a bass player. Found this young high school student who is pretty solid on bass at the tender age of 18.

Who gigs of us fretters? Tell us more!

 

[jpfeifer]

I have a few different gigs that I do, some more often than others.

My regular gig is playing at a contemporary music service at a church on Sunday evenings. I usually play electric since we have 2 acoustic guitarists, piano, bass, and drums. I've been doing this gig for a long time. My daughter and my wife are both playing in the group so it keeps the whole family together, which I really like. The other thing that I like about this gig is that I'm usually backing up singers, so I get to do all the fills, weird sounds, etc. just to add color rather being the main musical part. It's fun to experiment with different sounds in a situation like this.

I also play casuals with another band. Our typical gigs are a 4 hour dinner+dance thing. We do dinner music for the first couple of hours then we do dance music for the rest of the evening. It's kind of fun because we get to play a lot of instrumentals during the dinner part (usually stuff out of the Real book), and then switch to classic rock, swing, country, etc. for the second half. We call this gig "two hours of Love Boat followed by two hours of Fun". I like the variety and it keeps me on my toes musically. We play whatever they want to hear so the songs vary alot with the crowd. We might play a Duke Ellington song followed by The Kinks , followed by Garth Brooks. These's something about that variety that I really enjoy.

-- Jim

 

[Spudman]

I just played one this past weekend at a private club that I regularly play.

I've gigged with the other guitar player and drummer for the last few years with other spots being filled as needed. This gig was quite a surprise. A keyboard player that had just gotten off the road after over a decade of touring showed up. He just moved to town a couple months ago and boy can he play. Unfortunately, the thing about bands is the chemistry both musically and personality wise need to be there for a long lasting working relationship to work. In this case it doesn't exist with the other fill in players.

From my experience I will never suffer again having someone in the band who doesn't fit in just for the sake of having the spot filled. If the personality fits then I'm 100% in. If there is instability and strangeness to a degree that harmony is missing then I'll keep looking for that "right" person. It's kind of like a marriage, right?

 

[t_ross33]

Just played our FIFTH, count 'em, fifth gig with the new band last weekend - a 25th Anniversary party for friends of our drummer. A freebie (and a surprise for the couple), but ended up being a pretty good showcase for us and we're sure to get some work out of it.

We've been playing about once a month (practice as much as twice a week, as little as once a month - depends). Current lineup consists of drums, guitar (me), bass and keyboards/guitar. We all do a bit of vocals, but our bass player is our primary vocalist. We all play a variety of instruments so we can put our drummer or me on bass, bass on keys, keys on drums, bass on drums... where was I?

We have an active set list of about 70 songs, more than enough to get through a night of four 45 min to 1hr sets. I think that's a pretty good start as we've only been together for about 6 months (and we all have day jobs, families etc. etc.) We have a running list of songs we want to do, or have thought about doing that is sitting at about 270 to date. We bill ourselves as a party band and cover lots of familiar tunes from the 50's on. We do country, country-rock, 50's/60's, classic rock, lots of 80's stuff, Nickelback, Green Day. We do a pretty raunchy version of Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues", so we're looking at a country arrangement of AC/DC's "Hell's Bells" just to even things out

Response has been great so far. We're having a blast and the crowds seem to really dig it too.

We will be playing in "The Big Tent" for local Canada Day celebrations July 1st. July 21 and 22 we are booked in to a local watering hole, complete with jam session on Saturday, then on the 29th we are playing for a homecoming dance in a nearby community. Nothing booked farther out than that, but the intention is to only play a gig or two a month as family time is very important to all of us.

Trev