TimR

That really depends on what the business entity Status Quo is, and what partnerships and contracts are involved with the other members.

Yes. That’s been well known for a long while. There was an interview with Daltry about choosing a new drummer and the new choice of ‘the four to the floor guy’ didn’t fit with the rest of them. Having a powerful melodically strong rhythm section meant Townsend being pushed into rhythm guitar position a lot of the time.

@Barking Spiders the longer and older bands get, the more they start to resemble West End Musicals or any other travelling play. People don’t expect to see certain lead ‘actors’, unless they’re specifically advertised as being there, and essentially there’s only one ‘licensed’ version going on at any one time. If the audience don’t like that, then they vote with their feet, whether it’s right or wrong is a moot point. But clinging on to a version of the original band isn’t really facing up to facts. It’s just entertainment at the end of the day.

At what point do you stop playing music with the musicians you created it with, and start to play the part of someone who used to be in a band? If you’re dressing up and putting on wigs to make yourself look like someone else (even a former version of yourself), playing music written 30 years ago, then it’s gone from the former to the latter.

Indeed. It does become a little bit embarrassing to watch though. Usually in a small local theatre or holiday camp. If these guys are the creative musicians or even professional level musicians they think they are, with all their contacts and history, it shouldn’t be too hard to start completely new bands with new songs. If I was playing holiday camps in 2019 with a band that hadn’t had a hit since 1989, and it was my sole income, I’d be wondering exactly what I was trying to achieve. If it’s a weekend turn up and play and take the money, that’s probably exactly the same as most of us are doing, but we are doing it with more transparency, I don’t wear a wig and pretend I’m 40 years younger than I am...

Iron Maiden had it sussed.

Get some cards printed. Go watch some cover bands. Work out who the main man is and chat. Put cards up in local guitar shop. Same as advertising yourself as available to join a band but just not as a permanent player. The more bands you play with, the more word will get around. I’m playing in a covered band but do the occasional dep for people I’ve played with before or people they know.

Have you considered depping?

I listened to it live on Radio 2. Thought it sounded awesome. Crowd were loving it. I cant image watching them to be particularly riveting. I’m sure they used to add loads of dancers in hot pants to their gigs to liven it up.

No one should come to first rehearsal with any specific ideas of how you are going to play the song. Unless someone has sat down and written out arrangements, the first play though is to feel how a song goes with your individual’s abilities and styles. After a few play throughs it should be obvious 1. Whether the song works. 2. What parts clash. 3. Which bits are empty and whether they need filling. Deciding on a fill, before you’ve even played a note is daft. So is deciding on a harmonic line when you’re just assuming that the guitarist will be playing what’s on the original recording. If you’re not, why should he be? And people who can’t play bass showing me how to play a line on bass is always entertaining. I let them show me, say “That’s interesting”, mostly it’ll be an incoherent mess, then I do what I want.

@casapete Yes. I went outside and ordered it on my phone for delivery next day. Same price.

Which makes me suspect that it’s done deliberately to get customers into the shop. I had exactly the same conversation practically word for word in two separate Currys stores. They really didn’t want to sell me the PC. Suggesting the next model up. Then checking stock to find that the 3 on the system didn’t exist and when I suggested I’d buy the one on display, both stores spent at least 15 minutes ‘looking for the boxes’ before deciding they couldn’t find them and on no account could they sell them without the box. The same happened with Bluetooth headphones in 3 stores. The £15 ones wouldn’t be suitable for me, then they couldn’t find any in the stock room. I wonder how many people are upsold all sorts of things.

I think online stock levels still require a certain amount of manual intervention. Not bass related but I was after a kickboard for my kitchen from B&Q. My 4 local stores all had it in stock. I visited them all, after the second one I phoned ahead to the third one. Yes. They had one in stock. Finally it seems that the item I wanted was discontinued anyway. I doubt it’s done deliberately, except for PCWorld/Curry’s where they definitely stock extremely cheap PCs to get people into the store and then upsell, it’s just bad management of inventory.

I think it’s partly because often you come out of a big chorus into a verse for the solo and that’s usually when a song scales back anyway. I think the way forward is to record the song and see if it actually is losing drive and thickness or whether it’s my imagination. I’d then be able to play around in my own time and see what works.

We kind of have. And the bottom falls out of the songs in the solos and the songs lose momentum. Yes. Space, and light and shade are important but don’t think the guitar solo is necessarily the right place for them.

Cool. No one will remember the bum note and half the audience won’t notice a guitar out of tune if your singer is running around and getting all the attention.

I think they’re some Pink and Christine Aguillera numbers. Lots of strings/keys padding the sound. Some of them need to descend to D so mean playing up the octave.

Timescale-wise. We have learned about 12 songs from scratch in about as many practices and played our first ‘full’ gig with the new singer two weeks ago. We have a 30minute slot to fill on Saturday evening with the last practice last night. Sitting down and working out arrangements doesn’t really happen, we jam through a song and improvise round it to see if it works quickly. Then develop it or scrap it depending on first impressions.

Indeed it can. However that takes time. The songs are evolving slowly. Most of them are fine. Just two or three that have no baseline other than 8th root notes.

Exactly my thoughts. Traditional power trio bands is what we’ve been covering for 5+ years and all have an arrangement already well suited for bass and guitar by their very nature Modern pop doesn’t. So having rhythm section chugging over a fairly bland solo is what we end up with. The problem is if the rhythm section is just bass and drums I can’t carry on chugging along with any real effectiveness. The risk with creating a tasteful bass lick is the “it doesn’t go like that” reaction I’m likely to encounter but I’ll see what I can come up with. It may actually go down very well. I do have a chorus pedal. I think I’ll just whack that on and see what happens for starters.

Could have done with a No, the rest are pretty reliable too. I’ve got used to singers and brass players who turn up last minute and hand you a lead to plug in. In the end it’s much better that way, having had band members like that who would otherwise turn up early and either get in the way or get drunk or both, it is the best way to manage them.

Our ‘power trio’ a started playing a lot more modern pop/rock songs. Lots of these songs are multi layered with strings, synths, rhythm guitars etc. When the guitar solo starts, everything sounds a bit weak. Any ideas on FXs etc to ‘thicken’ up the bass lines during solos, or should I come up with an interesting line to complement the solo?

@shoulderpet what happened? All the issues vaporised before the next practice? Guitatists girlfriend run off with singer? Drummers girlfriend not let him do the gig? Band implode due to musical differences? It’s been 4 weeks gig date must have passed by now.

Pubs are closing at the rate of 3 a week. Business rates are astronomical and people would rather watch XFactor with a pizza and some supermarket lager. Playing 70/80s rock isn’t going to inspire anyone to come out especially if it’s not even inspiring the musicians who are playing it. You need to up your game, there are two types of musician, those that evolve and look for opportunities and those that just give up. We have changed singers and got a girl in and learned a completely new set. No more ‘dad rock’, playing to Jeremy Clarkson nursing his pint of real ale, her mates come along and we have a good crowd of girls dancing who get the place moving. Selecting and learning 30 new songs for the entire band is hard work, won’t deny that. Not the actual mechanics of learning songs, we are musicians, that’s what we do, but selecting and working out whether a song is going to work within the first few play throughs. Some just work from the start, if a song isn’t working on the 3rd play through, we move on, but getting some members of the band to drop a song that they proposed can often be ‘difficult’.

‘a touch’?