Band Practice - Week 3

Super Bowl Sunday marked the third week of 71 South, and another practice session.

Unfortunately, I was running late, and missed the first 45 minutes of practice (they should fire me). I got stuck at Guitar Center where I was purchasing a new Acoustic/Electric guitar for use on "I'm Yours" and "Black Horse and Cherry Tree." (I got an Ibanez AEG20 - a great little affordable guitar.)

We tried out 2 new songs this week, which we have never played before. "Before He Cheats" sounds surprisingly good. We only have one guitar, a bass and drums, and yet I think we filled out the sound well. Mike's covering guitar on that one, and I'm playing bass. Katie's inspired vocals (perhaps she was jaded at some point in her life?) were incredible. This is a great song for us, and I look forward to playing it out.

The other new song was Modern English's "I'll Melt With You." This one is a little tougher because of the multi-layered sounds. I'm playing guitar, and I'm trying to leverage my Digitech RP350 to create several different sounds for this song. There are so many different parts, it's difficult to switch sounds and I switch parts. We've moved the key on this one up a step so Katie can sing it. With only one guitar, the chorus sounds really shallow, so instead of playing the part, I may just strum the chords to fill it out a little bit. This is a great song and will be an interesting challenge for us.

We also worked on some other songs that we've been playing a while, and they are all coming together nicely. Part of our challenge is that we aren't full-time musicians, so sometimes we just don't have the time to practice like we should. For example, I was traveling all week last week and didn't have access to a guitar to practice. I was pretty rusty on Sunday.

But, we are all having a blast and are committed to working to improve in order to give the audience a kick-ass live music experience. We hope to be playing out soon, and look forward to seeing all of you there.

Rawk On!