PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Musical Acumen

I was working briefly with a bunch of guys trying to get the into a lace where they were passable enough to take their little blues band (We have at least 100 bands here that do what they do) out to play it. During one rehearsal, the singer missed the timing on a pickup note AGAIN (6 straight rehearsals he made the same mistake) and I went OFF on him. I told him that he kept making that same mistake every week, and every week I corrected it, and he did it right. Until the next week when he did it wrong again.

I tried to explain the concept of "anticipation", where sometimes a syllable comes before the downbeat.

Deer in the headlights.

Then I asked the million dollar question. "Don't you know what the downbeat is?"

He didn't know that! How do you play guitar and sing and NOT know what "downbeat" means? Had this guy cared enough about the craft that is music he would have invested 2 hours per night 2 nights a week for 9-10 weeks and learned BASIC BASICS. I don't ask that anybody can score a 16 staff symphony. Learn what rhythm is. Learn the circle of 5ths. Learn how to read time signatures. Learn the steps of a scale, the difference between major and minor, how to build chords. I don't expect anybody to suddenly become Mozart and write manuscripts perfectly the first time to where there is no backup copy. Just learn basic basics.

We had a discussion here once about chord structure and how I was taught the concept. Everybody dismissed the way I learned it by half step count to tell me "Any major chord is 1-4-5." Great.

What does 4 mean? What does 5 mean? 1-4-5 calls for the person to know scales and scale structure. Where the half steps and whole steps are. To a newbie, 1-4-5 means what downbeat meant to that singer.

As far as that band, I called the guy who was running the band and business side of it that night and said I wouldn't be back. I can't fit into a group of people who call themselves musicians and don't speak "music". I told them that with what he had to work with, which was a young hot guitar player and a bunch of guys named Joe, that they would never be more than a "wives and girlfriends, friends and family" type band and that I wasn't interested in playing for 20 people. They played 6 gigs, the guitar player bailed to move to Nashville, and they got a new guitar player who was yet another "wing it" player. They lasted 6 more gigs and disbanded. At the root of it was that the guy running it was the drummer and he was possibly the worst drummer I ever tried to play in front of. I turned on a click track at that same final rehearsal and he was already off time after 4 bars. You can hide anything on stage except the drummer. The drummer has to be great. When I was in the Motown band and we were auditioning for a new drummer, it came down to 2 guys. We called them both and said that we were going out that night to drink some beer and hear some music and they should join us. When they got there we all sat around and didn't talk about the band AT ALL. What I DID do was have one of the band's girl followers "just happen to be there" and get them both to dance. One was smooth as could be on the dance floor. The other looked like a badly animated stick figure. We hired the good dancer, because he had a better natural feel for rhythm.

And he knew what quarter note triplets are. (Theory.)