This week I start a ‘new’ gig with a band I played with a few years ago. Their guitarist has to leave the country immediately due to some family concerns so I said I’d fill in. He’s gone indefinitely, so the gig will last a while.

Being a band that does 5-7 gigs per week, the money will definitely help but being more of a ‘variety’ band, I got to thinking about some of the potential benefits to my playing. This got me thinking about how the various bands I’ve played with over the years, each one completely different from the next, has both expanded my vocabulary as a guitarist and contributed to my playing style. I figured this’d make for a good post so here ‘tis…

I started out playing pretty much nothing but Metal. Maiden, Ozzy, Yngwie, Twisted Sister, Crue, etc..  This helped me to form a decent foundation on which to build. The first three bands I played with were all metal bands and, while completely different from one another, all shared a loud heavy vibe. In ‘94, I moved to South Carolina to try and make a living from playing. Traditionally, the Metal scene doesn’t pay very well so I looked at other types of music. The first band joined in SC was a Country band. Now, I have to preface this with the fact that I really don’t have any Country chops. I understand the vibe and style and have learned some Country type licks but I simply don’t have that Country vibe in me. Nonetheless, learning a couple hundred songs in any style is bound to help a guitarist learn some new stuff, it definitely did for me. The biggest thing I took from this foray was the use of Hybrid picking. I’d touched on it briefly from fooling around with some Eric Johnson stuff, but playing in the Country band, with less gain on my tone, I found myself using some of the fingers on my picking hand along with the pick to accommodate the licks I was trying to pull off. This is something I still do pretty often, nowadays I don’t really think about it, it just happens. Another thing that happened during this phase was a broadening of my use of Pentatonic and “blues” scale based riffs. Prior to this experience, I mostly stuck with minor, harmonic minor, etc… Playing the Country stuff really expanded on this.

The next band I played with was kind of a Top 40ish rock band. Definitely more rock than Top 40 but far from Metal. This experience taught me to dial in and play with a less distorted sound and learn to make it every bit as ballsy as before. I learned that while I love a heavily distorted rip your face off crunch tone, it doesn’t always fit the music being played. Yeah, I know, duh! Shoulda known that all along. But hey, at least I learned, right? It was also during this time that I STARTED learning to slow down, play more melodically, a wider range of melodic ideas. I say STARTED because this was a process that took a long time. Hey, I grew up on Yngwie and EVH, LOL! Additionally, I learned to make one tone work for a variety of different sounds….. I think it was during this time that I started to develop my own tone, that thing that, no matter what rig I’m playing through (within reason of course), I still sound like me. I was using a pretty interesting rig at this time; A Roland GP-8 into two 100 watt Carvin heads, one from the late 80’s, one from the early 90’s - each into a Carvin 4x12 and a Peavey Stereo Chorus 2x12 (Solid State). It was a rather large rig for the gigs I was playing, but man it sounded good! That Solid State Peavey definitely added a new flavor to the all tube Crunch of the Carvins. With all three running simultaneously, it sounded gargantuan!!!

After a couple years doing this, I decided to, once again, venture into the Country style. This band was more of a Country Rock kinda band so a lot of my playing style fit well, but I still had to bone up my Country chops considerably. This gig definitely reinforced the hybrid picking I’d been doing as well as serving to augment my use of pentatonic and blues stuff. I look at this as kind of a ‘Sophomore’ outing into Country. Due to some circumstances, this gig was cut short & the band fizzled, only a couple of months. But I learned a lot, played a lot of gigs and had one hell of time. One thing I picked up was the knowledge of just how wild some of the female Country fans can be. Good Googely Moogely - it was a heck of a two month ride, LOL!

After this I ventured back into the harder side of things. At this point it’d been a few years and I was really itching to get loud again. So I joined up with a hard rock band, not really Metal in the modern sense of the word, but I guess for the 90’s it was. During this time, I realized that, with all the different stuff I was learning and playing, I’d abandoned a lot of the stuff I used to play, so this was a time to kinda re-up on that and learn to integrate the other stuff I’d learned into a heavier kind of thing. This gig lasted about a year….

The next few years, I bounced back and forth between a couple of the aforementioned bands. I don’t know if I did a lot of learning during this time, I think it can be better summed as a time where I kinda honed the skills and styles I’d learned more into my own little thing…..

After a two year break from music (hey, a guy can only spend so much time in the clubs, I needed that break), I joined back up with the hard rock band. Since I hadn’t played in a couple years, it took a little bit of doing to kinda get back to where I’d left off. But in a few weeks I was playing, roughly, at the level I was before taking that hiatus. It was during this time that I got a call for a COMPLETELY different kind of gig - a dance-based variety band. A little rock, a lot of dance music. Other than the requisite ‘Brick House’ and ‘Play That Funky Music’, I’d never really done anything funky. It was a very good paying gig at a somewhat prestigious venue, so I jumped on it. In the process of learning around 500 hundred songs for the band (most of which I STILL haven’t played live, LOL), I immediately learned that I had a LOT to learn. Not just on the theoretical side of things, but also as far as sound, HOW I played things, etc… Funk guitar might as well be a completely different instrument for all the adjustments I had to make. I played with this band for 3 years, learning and adjusting the whole time. One of the biggest adjustments for me was learning to play with a clean sound most of the time. I’d sometimes go a week or two without kicking in the overdrive at all. Definitely a big adjustment. But it REALLY helped me a lot! Playing without any distortion, you really have to be clean, it’s extremely unforgiving. Another change I had to make was in how I held my pick. For the prior 20 years I’d held my pick between my thumb and forefinger tips, kinda ‘pinching’ it. I learned that holding it this way didn’t reinforce the pick enough so a lot of notes I was playing weren’t coming out. So I adjusted my picking grip so that I now hold it between the sides of these two fingers. This results in more of the pick’s surface being covered, better bracing the pick. Yeah I know, this is the ‘proper’ way to hold a guitar pick and I should have been doing it all along, but I didn’t. Once I started adjusting (which took about a year to get comfortable with), I realized, pretty quickly, that this was going to improve my playing. I also realized I was going to have to significantly alter my approach to playing. Before, I was able to kinda just drag my picking hand around, relying heavily on economy picking. While I could still do this with the altered grip, it wasn’t as natural. So now my playing is more of a blend between economy picking and definitive up/down picking. It’s kind of hard to explain so if you see me out, ask me and I’ll show you what I mean….

During this time I was also playing with an Acoustic act. Before this, I’d had zero experience with anything acoustic - I didn’t even OWN an acoustic until this gig came up. Any guitarist can tell you, playing acoustic guitar can require a completely different technique from playing Electric Guitar. As a result, I had to further examine some things I was doing, make some adjustments, etc. This really helped with my electric playing cause if you can do something passably well on acoustic, on electric guitar you’ll absolutely KILL it.

After three years, I was REALLY getting the itch to rock out again. Having made decent money with the previous band, I’d bought some Marshall gear, which really didn’t work so well for the Dance thing. I was actually pretty set on relocating out West to focus on some original stuff I’d written/recorded when a friend called me to ask if I’d come down and jam with his band. He’d been telling me of the band for a while, saying it was a Southern Rock band. My impression of Southern Rock is really twangy guitars, not much different from Country; something I wasn’t interested in. I wanted to rock out man, so I hadn’t been giving it much thought. When he called, though, I figured what the heck. I got down there, they showed me some of their original stuff and I really dug it. Then they said they wanted a loud nasty guitar to play on it. Damn - they couldn’t have come to a better person for that, LOL! I’m loud and nasty, haha! So We jammed a few times I I really dug it & decided to join that band. I’d been playing out my notice with the other band for a few months and that was just about to end.

Doing the Southern Rock thing (albeit loud and nasty) forced me to, once again, rethink a lot of aspects of how I play. I was able to call upon some of the stuff I learned from my two stints playing Country and combine it with the Rock stuff I’ve played forever. To me it was a really cool combination, one I dug immensely. Unfortunately, though, the sound didn’t seem to catch on too much so there wasn’t a lot of upward momentum. Shame too, cause the music is killer! At least I think so…

During my time with this band is when I wrote and recorded my CD, which is slated to be released in October. Listening through it, I can hear all of these elements, all these different things I had to learn to play in so many different bands, at one time or another - sometime to quite interesting effect. For instance, if you listen to ‘The Swami’, in the second half of the 1st ‘verse’ section, you’ll hear the melody switch from a sorta middle eastern sounding Harmonic Minor figure to a Major Blues ‘Happy’ sounding thing. That little piece actually came directly from the guitar solo I wrote for one of the Southern Rock band’s songs. When I was playing/recording the melody part, this just came out, I didn’t think about it or plan it. Had I not had that experience, this would have never happened. In the same song, right before the break down bridge, there’s a lick in D Major Pentatonic that’s directly related to what I learned playing Country. Additionally, if you listen to ‘Cop Show’, pretty much that whole song came from my time in the Funk/Dance band.

So the point of this whole thing is simple: for a musician, every gig is a learning opportunity. There are lessons for us all around, take every chance to play, play as many different styles as you can - it might not be your cop of tea, or what you’re interested in but if you dig learning on your instrument, there is no better way than to play something that’s NOT what you’re used to. In so doing, you will, without a doubt, improve your musical vocabulary and this will add greatly to your style. And if you do it well, it’s fun!