My Online Guitar Lessons

Showtime people! We party before the show at Mike’s with some Little Caesar’s Hot and Ready Pizzas. I ate too much, for the record. So we load up our vehicles and head over to the show.

We talk to the girl that invited me to play the show and who put on the whole breast cancer fundraiser. We find out when we are up, and get our equipment set up as much as possible at the side of the stage. We talk to some of the other bands, almost all of them known by our band through previous shows, school, or childhood memories. We get all dressed up ready to play, then find our own little table at the back to watch the show and sell our invisible merch to our hundreds of gorgeous and single lady friends.

To see a review of the bands and how our performance went, check out the lead guitarist Mike’s blog here.

The band who won the battle (Corporate Saturday) did an amazing show, even though they did an acoustic set of their usual full band music. They actually have a CD out in music stores, and be sure to check them out as they are a great group of guys with some awesome music.

Until next time, stay sweet.

Jesse

Well, I’ll tell you who else to go. We tried out one kid name Pat who Mike used to jam with, but unfortunately he was not dedicated and didn’t leave us with a good impression. So we’ve gone through 3 drummers so far. At the beginning of the summer, we had a friend Christian who we wanted to play drums for us when we started up a band. Since then, he has been living 3 hours or so away working for the summer. So that’s a no-go. Or is it?

Luck would have it that Christian has exactly one week off before our show, leaving the day after even. So 4 drummers later Christian comes down and we practice our butts off to get our set down before the show. Our set list is as follows:

Face Down- The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

All Around Me- Flyleaf

Sorrow- Flyleaf

The Kill- 30 Seconds to Mars (We did this one acoustic last show)

Amazing Because It Is - The Almost (A song we got the best response from last show, Crystal nails it)

That’s What You Get - Paramore

So we do the best we can and put it all together between the 5 of us…

Last Friday, (4th of July), our band played a battle of the bands against some great local talent in support of breast cancer. While we didn’t take home the trophy, what a great learning experience it was for us.

I blogged previously about my acoustic show with my good friends Crystal and Mike, and since then, our band has expanded. When we took what we learned from that show, we decided that we needed to change our musical direction somewhat. We decided that Crystal was such an amazing singer that she should lead, and leave me and Mike up to the guitar work. That was fine with us, and we also decided we wanted a fuller sound, including a drummer and bass. We turned from a small acoustic show to a full band when we had another opportunity to play live.

We looked at our previous setlist, took our favourite songs out, and incorporated them into a new set. Half of the songs we chose to cover had a female lead vocalist; bands like Flyleaf and Paramore. Now it just came down to learning and practicing the new songs as a band. We luckily found a bass player - Andrew - who Mike used to play with in a previous band. So now we were up to a four man band, and looking for a drummer. This is where it gets interesting. We decide on a band name and take some promo shots for some flyers for our show next Friday, July 19th.

However, we are still stuck for a drummer. We literally ask everyone we know for a drummer, and come across a few prospects. We started with my friend David who I jammed with previously, who picked up the songs quick and it looked like we were ready to go. Then after a few practices, he informed us he could not make the July 4th show. Now we look for another drummer. We get a recommendation from David for this amazing drummer named Justin. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to practice with him before our first show, as he left the week before the show for a few days. 2 drummers down, who else to go?

We got up on stage without an introduction or saying anything to the crowd first. We just stepped up to our mics, and started playing through our set.

Not being professional showmen or anything, I feel we did pretty well. Our nerves were quite calm as we have all been on stage and performed before, just not in this setting.

We should have interacted a little more with the crowd - introduced ourselves at least - but I guess we just wanted to play. We made it through all our songs almost perfectly, and the feedback we received from everyone after was positive and encouraging.

I had a friend record the show so hopefully I’ll get the DVD soon and upload it to YouTube and get it up on my blog soon.

With only one day left before the performance, all we could do is try and fine tune our songs through more practice. We also got busy calling up our friends and inviting them to come see our first show.

The day of the performance came, and we were set to play at 8 o’clock that night. We did another little run through at my place before cramming all of our equipment into our ‘tour bus’, also known as my parents’ white GMC safari. We then killed some time before we had to set up at the venue.

We got there at around 7 and began hauling in the gear and setting up the stage. We practiced our first two songs on stage before everyone got there to set up the mics and monitors. After we were happy with the sound levels, we just hung out until it was our time to shine…

Our first practice started out with me and the other guitarist Mike learning the songs on guitar. I guess that could be one of the first lessons I learned from this. You really shouldn’t try to learn the guitar and vocal parts at the same time. I feel it is more efficient to learn one of the two parts up to snuff before putting them together. That way, if you learn the guitar part to where it becomes subconscious or second nature to you, you can concentrate on developing the vocals without having to focus too much on the guitar.

After getting the whole gang together and running through some song ideas, we picked the winners and tossed the losers. Here is where the second lesson came about. Just because you can play the song in any key on a guitar, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to sing it in any key. Experimenting with different keys to find your vocal range is important. If you’re going to do a cover, most people in the audience won’t even notice if it’s not in the original key. However, they will be able to notice if you are straining your voice to try and hit the notes. Making it sound the best you can doesn’t necessarily mean making it sound exactly like the original.

After we finally decided on all our songs’ keys, we tried to create our own sound for each of them. Crystal being an amazing harmonizer would pretty much do the harmony for every song, although we switched things up a bit. We messed around with which guitar effects we should use for each song, as well as which guitars were going to be used and when. We started out deciding that we were going to bring just one acoustic and one electric guitar with amp, but after different tunings and sounds we ended up bringing three electrics, one acoustic, one combo, and one half stack. Lesson number three - if you have the resources to sound professional, use them. At first I was against the idea of bringing all of that gear, mainly because almost all of it was mine, and I just didn’t want to lug all of that equipment. After some discussion, I gave in to the idea, which in hindsight was a wise decision.

From there, it was just practice, practice, and then some more practice. We spent whole days in my garage playing each song over and over again. We organized our set list, but we weren’t yet satisfied with our ending song. We tossed some more ideas for a final song around, we wanted something high energy with two electric guitars to close with. We ended up thinking of one about two days before the show. It came about completely by accident. We didn’t even need to look up the guitar parts or lyrics for it! That worked out nicely for us, as the performance date was only two days away…

Our setlist:

Your Guardian Angel - The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

Thunder - BoysLikeGirls

Anyone Else But You - The Moldy Peaches

The Kill - 30 Seconds to Mars

Dare You to Move - Switchfoot

Amazing Because It Is - The Almost

When In Doubt - Thousand Foot Krutch

I probably should have blogged about this a lot sooner, but better late than never.

In my previous blog ‘The 5 Mistakes Beginners Make‘, the 5th one was not playing in front of people. Well, last Friday was my chance to do so.

On Friday May 2nd, I was fortunate enough to open for a few local bands in my area–my first “almost official gig” I guess you could say. Not a whole big crowd or anything really, but it is something that will be memorable and taught me a few lessons.

My friend Kat was putting on free local shows, renting out her church the first Friday of each month for any local bands looking for some exposure. Originally, I was going to do my own acoustic set with my friend Crystal (an amazing singer by the way), since we had done some acoustic stuff together for my highschool talent show in the past.

So I was looking through my iTunes playlist for some good acoustic cover songs we could do together, while talking to another friend about starting a little band project up in the summer. I had mentioned that I was invited to play a show, and asked if he wanted to play the guitar as well. So now our original acoustic set had turned into a trio with acoustic and electric guitars…

Take a look at this video of me and Crystal covering ‘Hey There Delilah’ by the Plain White T’s for my senior year highschool talent show.