Waiting for the Stage
Well, I’m seriously behind on keeping up with the blog…in part due to life getting in the way and in part because the TTS got busy, settled into its own rhythm, and in reality there just haven’t been any rousing controversies to write about. Being part of two bands means practice at the Freight admin offices on Sunday evenings…..for 5 hours with 2 groups and a couple of hours of practice once or twice a week with the groups individually…….and practice on my own with all the remaining time I have left…usually when I should be sleeping.…..so guess what falls by the wayside. I will try to catch up in this blog and bring everyone up to date.
One thing is that now my band mates all know I am blogging the TTS, I get all sorts of comments about how they have to watch what they say and comments about how practice events are going to make it into the blog are now standard fodder for when anything goes awry in a practice….yada yada yada. C’est la vie.
It’s also probably fair to say that TTS has become a little like work…….enjoyable to be sure, but it takes a certain amount of repetition to lock in the melody and chord changes and figure how to work with the idiosyncrasies my fellow band members….some folks have a tendency to come in early or late…..or speed up during their break or vocals and then slow down once it’s finished. Dave is gently and diplomatically “encouraging” us to take responsibility to learn the chord changes and transitions, which is to say if he had his way I think he would smack us all up the side of the head and say learn your uhhhh stuff………and most annoying it seems like every practice something is modified with the arrangements….add a break, take out a break, do the break over the chorus not the verse……and who is doing the fills and when…….for me getting the fills straight is my personal battle so not to step on someone else’s playing…after all it is more fun to keep trying out new fills during a song and chopping gets a little boring after awhile.
So the way this has all fallen out for me is that for the 5pm group I have 3 kickoffs, 4 breaks, one ending tag and a couple of vocal bits, and for the 7:30 pm group I have 1 kickoff, 5 breaks, and a big vocal. The breaks have been slow to come together with the last two falling in place basically the week before the performance. It’s been a long time since I performed music and when I was performing in my teens everything was off sheet music. I didn’t have to learn the songs by ear or work up my own breaks….so this has not been easy. But, the prospect of letting down the rest of the group and the potential for public humiliation……..or at least more humiliation than absolutely necessary……...is a motivating factor to try and get my breaks worked out.
The groups chose band names during my writing absence. The process for choosing names pretty much reflected the band personalities. The 5pm group actually chose the band name our first evening together in February…..”6 Floors Up” since the Freight admin offices where we practice are on the 6th floor. No fuss no muss and hardly any discussion. The 7:30 group, being the introspective sensitive group that it is (not), took a bit more soul searching and discussion to arrive at a final choice. So from here on out the 5pm group is known as “6 Floors Up” and the 7:30 group is “4 Cold Walls” from the lyrics of one of our performance songs.
Tom Rozum was our visiting coach for both groups on March 1. It is always good to get different viewpoints on how to do stuff and Tom didn’t disappoint. We were especially interested in his input since we are covering a couple of songs Tom has performed with Laurie Lewis. My vocal contribution for “6 Floors Up” is singing baritone harmony on the chorus of one song. Since I seem to have a vocal range that encompasses baritone and bass Tom suggested I shift to a traditional bass vocal, which hangs on the 1 and 5. Tom also helped us with some of the song structure, a different viewpoint on trading fills, and more vocal stacks. It gave us all lot to work on and try to incorporate over the remaining time we have to practice.
Repetition, repetition, and more repetition. I’m going to be sick of some of these songs at the end of this….but that is what it takes to get everything locked in for the performance.
Once we settled on our band names we had to get the band pictures out of the way. Scott Peterson is a professional photographer and agreed to do the “6 Floors Up” picture, which turned out great, and we just winged it with personal cameras with “4 Cold Walls” but that pic turned out ok too. It’s a shame that the band pics are so small on the TTS webpage and can’t be enlarged.
In addition to practicing our music, now we also have to practice stage movements and make sure we get everything played and said under 25 minutes. We had to cut some breaks to get the “6 Floors Up” set under 25 minutes but our “4 Cold Walls” set is comfortably within the limit. One of the things both groups pay attention to is our opening and closing songs. Both groups have really good closers and the opener for “4 Cold Walls” has a great kick…..need I say it is a dobro kick. Part of our time spent in the practices is also working up our stage banter. This gives us an outlet for blowing off steam and trying to come up with off color jokes that we can tell in public……….of course the best jokes all seem to involve banjos.
Two weeks out and the practices start happening more frequently. The “4 Cold Walls” has been doing weeknight and Saturday practices since the beginning and the songs feel more settled. The “6 Floors Up” group has had more scheduling problems and the winter/spring cold virus had a late season run on the group. But we’ve put in some quality practice time the past two weeks and it is impressive how quickly it all comes together. One of the more amusing things that has transpired is that Scott and I are perfectly in sync on trading fills….just not the way you would expect. On the fill handoffs, if one of us is a little late, we wait exactly one measure and then jump back in. The problem is, if both of us are a little off….then we both jump on the fill…..then we both play two measures of fill and stop…..and wait and both jump back in…..we are perfectly in sync on this and during a song it is really funny trying to figure how we get out of this synchronized fill cycle and get back into trading fills off.
Saturday is the sound stage session at the Freight, which means one week to go until performance. I still have some chord transition issues with some of the songs. Unlike guitar players, who all seem to intuitively know all the chords, even the weird ones, with dobro it’s a little different. Since it is in open G tuning, and we don’t fret the chords like a guitar,….playing a 7 chord or minor chord has certain challenges. So I’m drilling like crazy to clean up my breaks and get those funky chord transitions down.
The sound stage session was really fun and can probably best be described as a dress rehearsal. Since I am a total newbie to performing amplified music, and basically a nerd to boot, I was able to get my technology fix for the day and actually question the sound engineer about stuff. We also got to spy on some of the other bands to see what they are performing. I stay to hear a bit of one group but have to leave for a “6 Floors Up” practice at Jon’s house.
I think the sound stage session came at about the right time in the TTS schedule. The Zimmerman bands are at a point where we know the songs well, the arrangements are stable and we can play most of them confidently. So the stage basics add another layer of complexity to the mix. Now we have to remember to approach the microphones on our instrumental parts and, for some of the microphones, on vocals get right up on the mic with our lips virtually touching the cover. Then there are the monitors…..which weren’t as distracting as I thought they would be. It was pretty cool asking for more bass or guitar or vocal on my monitor to give me a personalized sound-scape of our performance.
Our last practice with Dave was Sunday, March 22. Basically we ran the sets and worked out a few little kinks. We added in a couple of dobro walkups for songs in both groups that I now have to remember. Jeez I still feel like I need to drill these songs more on my own to work out some rough spots that just don’t seem to go away. We schedule several practices for both groups during the week and try to decide when to get together on Saturday before the show to warm up and run the sets one last time. Overall everyone in both groups seems pretty satisfied with where we are for the show. We’ve worked hard and it has been a pretty intense 8 weeks cramming 12 songs into two 25 minute sets. Some of us are talking about getting together a few weeks after the TTS show and try to keep the momentum going to work up a full 2 hour set and go out and try some low key gigs. Hopefully we’ll feel the same after the show.
Now all we have to do is wait.
I hope we don’t channel the spirit of Twain’s quote.
Mark Twain - “Wagner's music is better than it sounds.”
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