My Online Guitar Lessons

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

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