PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Your Most Useful Music Making Tools

Eddie mentioned—Do the work. Thank you.

I've played with a lot of musicians who don't want to do the work, and they sound like it.

Being a musician is fun for many of us, but it certainly isn't easy.

I've dealt with

• Musicians who don't practice their scales/arpeggios/intonation/tone
• Musicians who don't care to learn to read music or learn at least basic music theory
• Musicians who use band rehearsal time to learn their parts, wasting everyone else's time
• Musicians who show up late or take long breaks
• Musicians who think it's OK to drink or do recreational drugs on the gig
• Musicians who spend more attention chasing members of the opposite sex than playing to the audience
• Musicians who think playing a popular song that would work for the audience is beneath them
• Musicians who have a Diva / Divo attitude
• Musicians who pick apart other musicians on stage for the slightest mistake
• Musicians who don't care about playing at the appropriate volume for the particular gig
• Musicians who are not having fun on the gig
• and so on

Mrs. Notes and I were in a few groups together. The last one was a 5-piece. We lost the bass player, and were out of work 2 months, finding a new one and teaching him all our songs.

Later that same year, we lost a drummer. Got a new one, this time we were only out of work one month.

She had a small kit, kept excellent time, provided tasty fills, didn't overplay, and could even play with brushes for the slow jazzy numbers. If that wasn't enough, she could sing backing vocals, too.

We go to our first gig, it was a Dodger Pines Country Club in Vero Beach, FL (The Brooklyn Dodgers used to do spring training there). The audience was huge, and filled over capacity.

The F&B manager pulled back the accordion type room divider and told us we could set up in the bar/lounge. The drummer got excited and said, “God will never forgive me if I play in a bar!” I said, “God will have to forgive me for homicide if you DON'T play in this bar tonight.”

Back to Music Making Tools...

The next day I bought a Teac A-3440 reel-to-reel, 4-channel tape deck. I play drums, bass, at the time rhythm guitar and some keyboards, so I started making my own backing tracks.

I mixed to cassette tapes and bought an AIWA double bay cassette player, with volume sliders for each bay. I had a local repairman calibrate the cassette speed to within 1%.

Then MIDI came around and I bought a sequencer and synth modules and saved the songs to floppy disks. That was much better than carrying scores of cassette tapes (one for each song).

After a synth module failed on stage, I decided to do all the mixing at home, save to 192mp3 and bring two computers to the gig, which is something I still do. I use ThinkPad computers, because they are almost bulletproof. I just retired one I bought in 2002.

Mrs. Notes plays synth and rhythm guitar, and is an excellent singer. On stage, I play sax, wind synth, flute, I learned to play lead guitar, and I'm a decent singer (Mrs. Notes sings all the difficult songs).

Since we went duo in 1985, we were never out of work until COVID reared its ugly head, and now that it's in the rearview mirror, we are back to doing 15-20 gigs per month.

We both have intense work ethics, play what we need to play, adapt to each audience, show up on time, put in 110% for the entertainment purchaser, and have fun doing music and nothing but music to make our living.

Notes ♫