Originally posted by Nigel:
Bill, have you talked about their inability to rehearse with them? Just wondering what their position is on having more rehearsals.
I play in a classic rock band that I have been in for 8 years now. We still rehearse one day a week simply to keep adding new songs. It simply makes it more fun for us to increase our range of material plus it is nice to be able to pull out new songs for audiences that have seen us many times. They appreciate the variety.
Yes, in fact we talked about it last night. Drummer works a mid shift (8a-8p) every day except T/W when he teaches at a local music store from 3:30pm - 10:00pm...The other two guys work traditional 9-5 type jobs. That is a big part of the issue. No real options there either.
Generally, the feeling from them goes like this..."Bill, we know between 80-100 tunes. We never repeat a song ever during the night and eventually a new tune will sound great. Why consider something as drastic as ending the band?"
By a scheduling quirk, we'll be back at the same club on Saturday night that we played on NYE. So it was a perfect time to bring in a chunk of new stuff. I brought in lead sheets for nine new tunes last night. We got five of them worked into the gig and 4/5 weren't so bad for a 1st time run through. (Yes, this is the exact point that bugs me...) The other, was pretty rough.
(I should say people danced for all the new stuff, no one complained or looked at us funny...But I knew it wasn't as good as it could be...)
Given the lack of rehearsal, I often email the charts out with video links of renditions that will give them the idea of what I'm looking for...
It just drives me wild what progress we could make on a tune if we even had 15 minutes to shape it up...
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Bill in Dayton
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