I've just been in a curious situation where I couldn't remember what website I actually wanted and kept pressing random keys until I found it...
Didn't have time to write this last night; Dante asked me to come to the Jam session at Katies so I packed both my guitars and went there after band practice with The Fakes (they tend to tune to E flat so it makes sense to bring my Les Paul which is also tuned to E flat!) I had no preconceived idea of what I was going to do when I got there though.
Most of the time I was on stage I actually ended up playing bass, as it happens. We began with an improvised version of Through Glass with Dante singing, LC on guitar and Rob on the drums. I guess it went OK, if you don't set much store by how much it sounded like the original! We managed to leave out half the song...
That done, we hadn't got a clue what to play next (In a way I'm actually quite glad that my suggestion of This Is War by 30 Seconds To Mars didn't happen in the end, because almost certainly we'd have not done it very well!) and we decided to have a bit of a jam. LC started playing a hard rock style guitar riff in A, me and Rob joined in and Dante freestyled some vocals to it, and it was one of those moments of magic where we're literally just making it up as we're going along and yet it sounds like we'd been playing it for ages! Awesome stuff, I ended up shaking hands with the entire 'band' after that.
We tried another one, this time without Dante, and this went from LC's funky E choppy-choppy chords to a Jane's Addiction-style freakout, and ended up with Rob going mad and finishing with a Metallica mosh riff. Funnily enough it still sounded like we were playing the same song all the way through. It's amazing when it works!
After that I got my guitar out and tuned it down to Drop C sharp (far easier to do that with mine than LC's Ibanez, as I haven't got a locking nut,) and had of all things a blues jam! Dante's figured out how to do the rock'n'roll shuffle in drop tuning so that was the reason for it. It was a new and not entirely comfortable experience for me trying to play blues on a bass in drop tuning, and not one I have any particular desire to repeat, however the fact that I was still reaching for the familiar positions in the blues scale came up with some very interesting notes...
I was going to freestyle some slower stuff with Dante after that because we really enjoyed it last time, sadly it was not to be but there's always next time, I guess. And there will be a next time; I'm really enjoying that at the moment and it's a refreshing change from all the acoustic stuff I've been doing over the last few weeks.
Off to Swindon tomorrow. See you next week!
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