The Watering Hole

In our stride to reach the goal I have set fot my band of carrying a 150 song repretoire by the beginning of 2009, we have added 20 songs to our list. These are as follows:

iTS NOT MY TIME----  3 DOORS DOWN

SORRY----BUCKCHERRY

POSSUM KINGDOM------  TOADIES

I STAND ALONE--  GODSMACK

KING NOTHING----- METALLICA

DIARY OF JANE-----   BREAKING BENJAMINS

Shine - Collective Soul

Bawitdaba - Kid Rok

One Step Closer - Linkin Park

Papa Roach - Forever

Pantera - This Love, maybe Cowboys

Puddle of Mud - Psycho

Click Click Boom - Saliva

45- Shine Down

Save Yourself - Stabbing Westward

Them Bones - Alice In Chains

Most of these songs were by audience request at recent shows, quite a few of them are songs that I don't particularly care for but I don't pay myself, they do. I did put the Toadies tune and Them Bones on there because I had learned them for the other cover band.

So far audience response to us has been overwhelmingly positive, booking has been fairly consistent, although I suspect it will be a few months before we reach our goal of 4 to 6 nights of $500+ gigs a week.

Man I admire you for learning all those covers, I never had the patience, consequently I never earned a dollar in the music biz.

More power to ya Spai, next time I come to Florida (Crackerville up in that neck of the woods) I will stop in to your gig just for a little audio abuse.

Hey dude; do you play the solo to Shine????  As it is?? Or do you cheat and improvise or even worse; leave it out???

TTB, I play all the solos in our list as they are, but with a few little embellishments of my own to spice them up; an arpeggio here, a scalar fragment there, interpolated notes here and there, etc.... but that is just because playing the same thing night after night bores the living shit out of me. I get so bored that I learn things in alternate fingerings and such just to keep my hands from losing interest. For instance in The Pretender, I often play a game with myself and pick a random finger and play the song without that finger at all. In Rock You Like A Hurricane, I will often play all the solos without allowing my index finger to touch the fretboard.

Like I said I do things like this to keep myself entertained while playing, but it turns out that when some of the other local guitar dudes come out to shows they notice and so I guess it entertains them too, like an inside joke. More than once I have been asked about my goofball techniques and they tend to find the answers about them funny.

In our band, my other guitarist has better stage presence; he makes a dizzying array of faces, jumps around, etc.... I don't stand still or anything, but I am not the showman he is. So, to compensate, I do my goofy little technical things mentioned above as well as play with my hands reversed (strum the "solo" (such that it is) for Hash Pipe with the left while fretting with the right, hands crossed), playing with my hand inverted over the neck is another favorite, and doing the flip flop of the fingers fretting some notes above the neck and some beloew, all of these aren't exactly stunning technical feats, but audiences seem to like them.