And now for something completely (but not really) different...
I decided to go down The Maverick again and was pleasantly surprised to see Andy Fisher from Wordsley School down there; a really great guy who runs a terrific music department at his school. I also came across Pete who'd played drums with me before, so after recruiting Matt once again on bass and dashing off to my car to get my Strat, we began...
To be honest this suffered from the electric guitar. I guess when I'm playing my own stuff on my acoustic I take it for granted the dynamic range of the instrument, e.g. if you play soft you get a soft sound and if you play hard you get a more aggressive sound, whereas with the electric it basically depends on how the amp is set up and how loud it is, which for Get Out Of My Head was far too loud. Also, because the amp I was plugged in to was on the opposite side of the stage to the bass player, that made it almost impossible for Matt to see what I was doing, so he was finding it hard to follow my chords. They did their best, fair play to them, but by comparison I think it sounded a lot more messy than it did when I did the same thing with the acoustic guitar a few weeks past. Bitterness didn't sound too good either for the same reason, though at least the electric guitar was the sound I had in mind for it when I first wrote the song. The sound of the guitar was far too bright but as I was borrowing an amp, I shouldn't complain.
I didn't want to play Prisoner Of My Mind again after the last time (if you missed that blog, VERY broadly, the band liked it, the audience not so much.) and I was at a loss to which other of my own songs to play. We Will Survive would probably fit the bill but I need a guitar player capable of playing the DragonForce style pyrotechnics I'm planning for that one! So I decided to switch to covers. After establishing that none of the band knew Walkin' On The Sun, I elected to run with Local Boy In The Photograph, since we'd been talking about Stereophonics earlier and it's easy enough to follow the chords. This went fairly well and was probably the best song we played on the night, not necessarily the right venue (it seems to prefer classic rock,) but hey, it worked.
Nobody told me to leave at that point so we did Come As You Are by Nirvana, making this my only guitar solo of the evening. I need to make up my mind which 'voice' I'm going to use when I sing this; do I go with the safe low version which I know I can do? Or do I do the higher version which cuts through better but I can only do if I'm up for it? I actually did the one that I shouldn't have done, which was a mixture of the two and therefore lacked consistency. Also because I was playing it in standard tuning it threw Matt, who is used to playing it in D.
All in all, not one of my better ones, and I'll need to give it some serious thought before I play this one again. But it's all learning experience and Pete really wants to play drums with me on my own stuff. It's something I'll keep in mind but with anything up to 4 bands at the moment, this isn't looking likely right now.
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