Oh man, I wish I could be as focused as y'all. I haven't done the "I'm now going to learn the following piece" thing in years. And even that was only to try to prepare for playing bass for Bo Diddley. When we do covers in any of the bands I'm in, there's no attempt to play what's on the record, we treat all songs as if they were originals. Tabula rasa, baby.
Right now my side bands are pretty inactive. One, where the singer lives a couple hours away, exists only on paper really; hasn't played in almost 2 years now. The other side band, with my coworkers, has at least added a new song to our set, Warren Zevon's "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" (made famous by Linda Rondstat). It's a 3-chord rocker, and since I'm playing bass in that band at least for the time being, I did experiment on trying to do some little runs or fills with it, but none of them worked. It seems to be one of those songs where just playing the root actually sounds better and adds to the power of the progression. Whenever I tried to do more, even minimally, it actually hurt the song. I've always loved the song (particularly the original Zevon version), and I sing a lot of backing on it, including the entire chorus. Playing bass and singing is something I'm finally getting the hang of. We've also been working on another Zevon tune, "Lawyers Guns & Money," though I don't know if we've decided whether to actually put it in the set.
With Crash Pad, my "main" band, it has come out of hiatus because we're working on trying to polish a short 7-song set for a benefit gig on April 26. These are all songs I wrote, so it's mainly just getting everybody tight, especially the drummer, who I borrowed from the Hotheads (my coworker side band), who is still learning the songs and figuring out his parts. We threw out one song he had a problem with and replaced it with an older song, but otherwise it's been fairly smooth.
I'm also getting back into church playing, but that sitch is a "show up for an hour on Saturday, run 3 or 4 songs, and play on Sunday" kinda thing. I never know the material in advance until the day before, when we practice. Am getting used to working with lead sheets again after being away from church playing for a couple years. Also I'd forgotten about compound chords, and am getting used to dealing with those again. Depending on how comfortable I am with a given compound chord, I may play the whole thing, excise the added root, or play only the added root. It's a bit trial and error. The goal is to be able to play the whole compound chord every time, but I know from a technical level I may not be able to do that on every compound chord.
The new praise band director seems open to let me figure out what to do on each song, which has been the case with the three or four directors at my previous church, and suits me fine. Also, his approach is a lot more vigorous, performance-wise, in that he doesn't like to "water down" songs that have a bit of energy to them, which is what his predecessor did. That suits me fine too.
:AOK:
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But it is fun trying, and it is a good vehicle for learning a variety of skills. Once I get some of Gilmour's phrases and licks down, I will get a chart of the modes in Dm, and use the song to learn what I am doing in (1.) above in Dm and see if I can learn to find modes and scales in all keys without thinking so much.
