it's going well....
Entry posted by mark555
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After a few weeks of not making an entry into my blog I am back to keeping those kind enough to read it up to speed on where we are at and the life and times of a would be semi pro player here in Northern England.
Life in the band has been interesting, my Fender Hot Rod deluxe had valve issues and was horrendously noisy. It turned out it was a pre amp valve. This particular amp has three of those so I decided that as one of them was on the way out and causing so much trouble, I might as well get them all replaced. The guitar tech who worked on my guitars recently had recommended an engineer only a couple of miles away from where I live in the next village, so that was excellent in that there was no distance to travel, and on top of that the guy was very honest and very reasonable in his costs. I had used our other guitarists old amp, a Peavy Valve King for one rehearsal. It was as noisy as my fender before it was repaired. I think it also needs to go to the engineer.
Anyway, we have moved our practice time from Saturday afternoons to Thursday evenings. Mainly because Dave, our other guitar player has met the woman of his dreams and moved in with her and wants to have weekends free for now. It's fine with me because it frees my time up on a weekend to do some jobs round the house that are in need of completion.
We are almost at the point now of having enough numbers ready to play a gig with. We are aiming for thirty. It has taken quite a while on this journey to get here, but we have all put our families first and there have been times when we have all had to cancel rehearsal for various reasons. Another thing is that we have discussed what sort of songs to we rehearse: a) easy ones that we can get six of down in two weeks, or do we: 
do some that will be more challenging but perhaps give us a much better set. We have gone for the latter, the most recent one being Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb. I have never been a big pink Floyd fan, but I have to say that this is a stellar song and credit to Dave for nailing the two guitar solo's in it.
We are also finding that the midweek practice makes us focus more, as we don't have a full afternoon to go at.
One thing that is happening now is that plenty of people are wanting to know when we are going to play so they can come and see us, which is a good sign for us. Of course, in the back of my mind I am thinking "are we going to be good enough"? Yet I know for a fact we can play some knock out songs in our own style. I Keep telling myself that we are not going to be playing to people who are saying "Go on then, impress me". The people I want to play for are just your everyday people who want to hear live music, may be they might want to dance a bit. I think we all have to remember that this thing we love, the guitar, if we choose to get up and play live gigs, that the we are paid to entertain people. I really hope that the songs we have thus far chosen will do exactly that for the cross section of people that we get in our British pubs that put bands on. When our set list is complete I will post it here.
So, there we are, five more numbers and our set list has enough for a gig, then all we have to do is rehearse it until it is sharp enough to play for money!
Thanks for reading and best to all.
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