Guitars Just Won't Stick to the Recording

[nilorius]

I think that the main problem is that guitar player hears the bass absolutely different than the bass does, so there will always be a small or big conflict between guitar and bass. The best solution in his way is drummer.

[BigRedX]

I've played in two bands that just did covers and one band where half the set was covers and the rest songs we'd written ourselves. One of the covers bands was very much play it like it is is on the recordings. In the other two bands all we really took from the original were the lyrics and the vocal melody, the rest was based on our instrumentation, technical ability and what we thought sounded good. It helped that much of the time I was relatively unfamiliar with the songs we were covering, so I just treated them in the same way as any new song written by other members of the band, when it came to working out what I was going to play.

 

However the bottom line is that as far as our audiences were concerned, no one was upset that we hadn't stuck religiously to the recorded versions, and it didn't appear to prevent us filling the dance floor with enthusiastic punters.

Edited May 27, 2022 by BigRedX

[spencer.b]

Whatever gets you there , 

Sometimes I'll learn it from dots ,sometimes read the dots on stage , sometimes learn it from the recording ( sometimes note for note sometimes a rough approximation)  sometimes earhole it and bluff my way through it , it's all about context and your individual skillset 

Don't like TAB though

 

 

 

 

[Nicko]

15 hours ago, TimR said:

Add to annoyances on this theme, people who have no musical training and are unable to count bars or understand two and four bar phrases.

 

Trying to explain to someone last week that they're playing a 4 bar phrase twice and just because the last bar of that repeated phrase contains the same run that the following 6 bars contain, doesn't mean it's a 3 bar phrase followed by 7 bars of a repeated phrase. Arghhh.

 

 

I'm actually not sure why the alternative would be any different musically.  Both are equally valid and as long as everyone is changing in the right place it's simply a case of how someone has written the score.  When playing All My Life by the Foos does it matter if its alternating between 4/4 and 3/4 or if I thought it was 7/4?

[TimR]

3 hours ago, Nicko said:

I'm actually not sure why the alternative would be any different musically.  Both are equally valid and as long as everyone is changing in the right place it's simply a case of how someone has written the score.  When playing All My Life by the Foos does it matter if its alternating between 4/4 and 3/4 or if I thought it was 7/4?

 

That's not quite the same.

 

It affects how you rehearse together.

 

It's difficult to explain. In this example B^ are accented phrases of B. And you're trying to get the band to accent those phrases together. 

 

||:A...|A...|A...|B... :||

|B^...|B...|B^...|B...|

|B^...|B...|C...|C...|

 

Is not 

 

|A...|A...|A...|B...|

|A...|A...|A....|

|B...|B^...|B...|B^...|B...|B^...|B...|

|C...|C...|

 

Especialy when the person counting in the second example is consistently getting it wrong.

[Nicko]

1 hour ago, TimR said:

 

That's not quite the same.

 

It affects how you rehearse together.

 

It's difficult to explain. In this example B^ are accented phrases of B. And you're trying to get the band to accent those phrases together. 

 

||:A...|A...|A...|B... :||

|B^...|B...|B^...|B...|

|B^...|B...|C...|C...|

 

Is not 

 

|A...|A...|A...|B...|

|A...|A...|A....|

|B...|B^...|B...|B^...|B...|B^...|B...|

|C...|C...|

 

Especialy when the person counting in the second example is consistently getting it wrong.

IMO those are the same, and the problem is the other member just doesn't know when to accent.  It's just as easy to say when you play the 7 bars of B accent every second bar as to think of it your way.  I'm not trying to be pedantic here - I just don't see the difference.

[Downunderwonder]

3 hours ago, Nicko said:

not trying to be pedantic here

And yet you succeeded all the same.

 

When it's played along with the pattern as grouped in the traditional way it doesn't require extra memory.

 

It's much easier to remember differences from standard patterns than entire patterns. Even though the result is the same if you succeed.

[TimR]

3 hours ago, Nicko said:

IMO those are the same, and the problem is the other member just doesn't know when to accent.  It's just as easy to say when you play the 7 bars of B accent every second bar as to think of it your way.  I'm not trying to be pedantic here - I just don't see the difference.

 

It's all about phrasing. The only person not treating them as 4 bar phrases, is the only person getting lost. 

 

 

[12stringbassist]

My band play covers and we all listen to the record at home and learn it approximate to the record.
We then bash out a joint effort at our jam night.

If my guitarist doesn't play it exactly like the track, I'm relieved, as if you just reproduce the record, why not just play the record?
It's about what you bring to the track.

I can understand that the OP wants people to play like on the record when he has studied it.
The thing is though that not everyone dedicatedly and slavishly learns tracks note for note.
Guitarists tend to play along with the track and reproduce whatever they played at the time.

In an working band situation if that is a stipulated way of working, that's fine, but it doesn't happen in jam situations - people approximate things.

[12stringbassist]

On 17/04/2022 at 18:24, Skybone said:

There's always going to be "that" person in the crowd who is more than keen to inform you that "they didn't play it like that on the record".

 

We had a guitarist tell my guitar player once that Dave Gilmour didn't play whatever song it was the way we did.
I said "he would if he was in this band."

[zbd1960]

19 hours ago, Nicko said:

I'm actually not sure why the alternative would be any different musically.  Both are equally valid and as long as everyone is changing in the right place it's simply a case of how someone has written the score.  When playing All My Life by the Foos does it matter if its alternating between 4/4 and 3/4 or if I thought it was 7/4?

7/4 is sometimes written as alternating 3/4, 4/4 to avoid frightening the horses, or to make the rhythmic pattern clearer, particularly to avoid ‘tripletising’ the 3

[Downunderwonder]

One original tune we did was in 7/4. The drummer played it in 5/4+2/4. That worked ok. Another drummer played it Reggae with a beat missing. That worked even better. No guitarist was involved.

[lowdown]

 

 

[ubit]

Surely you rehearse before gigging, so any nuances would be sorted well before the performance. If you want to play a different version go for it I say. Cover bands should play songs but add their own flavour. Sometimes your band doesn't have the luxury of full horn sections or multi layering so the guitarist might have to cherry pick the best bits to make it recognisable.

[TimR]

Yes. Practice is what individuals do at home to get an idea how the song goes, chord progressions, bass lines, important riffs, basic structure.

 

Then rehearsal is when you find out that none of it works and has to be rearranged to suit the band. 

 

Then you go away and practice the new parts to the new arrangement. 

 

What you don't do is use rehearsal time to complain to each other that you're not all playing what's on the record. 😁

[BigRedX]

4 hours ago, ubit said:

Surely you rehearse before gigging, so any nuances would be sorted well before the performance. If you want to play a different version go for it I say. Cover bands should play songs but add their own flavour. Sometimes your band doesn't have the luxury of full horn sections or multi layering so the guitarist might have to cherry pick the best bits to make it recognisable.

 

Same with the bass part. You'd be surprised by how many 60s and 70s songs there are where the foundation of the bass is the left hand of the piano or organ and the bass is noodling aimlessly away in the mid range. In these cases unless your band has a good keyboard player you almost always end up playing something that owns more to keyboards than the bass guitar part.