Salutations™!!
Today, I picked up my bass guitar for the first time in over a year. Yep. A year. I love playing bass. I love when I play with my friends. What I don’t love is learning songs and I don’t like rehearsals. Both are necessary evils, though. And I get that.
©Adam Bielawski
So, I picked up the bass to learn ten Rick Springfield songs to play with Clay for Friday Night Music Club next week. Springfield isn’t known for complex tunes, necessarily. But, what is difficult is keeping up with all the changes. That’s really the hard part.
To make matters worse is that outside of “Jessie’s Girl,” there’s not a lot of tablature of his songs. To non-musicians, that means someone has taken the time to do music notation, including what fret on what string and so on, for us. I don’t necessarily have to have that, but being as I’m a year out of practice, it was harder for me to pull down the progressions. Of the ten songs, I have seven of them that I feel confident that I can pull off for rehearsal (ugh) on Tuesday. The other three, I’m not even familiar with so that’s going to be a little more difficult. One of those has no bass at all. It’s all synths and it’s arpeggio sequencing (the synth is set up to play these automatically). But, Clay wants me to make up a bass line from that. I can’t even figure out what key it’s in. whine-stomp-moan
I spent 3 hours playing these songs yesterday. I had to use a different method that before because I’m out of writable CDs. So, I had to play through my stereo system and have my bass amp there to play out loud. I decided to stand instead of sit because I sit way too much. I ended up getting over 7000 steps yesterday. About 5500 of it was from this. This means that I learned songs, I got exercise, I sweat like I was on stage, my feet hurt, my back hurts, my shoulder hurts, even though I have a light bass, and I feel good about it. So there.
Okay, I’m off to bed, early.
Until tomorrow, same blog channel…
Scorp out!
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“Fais l’amour avec moi. Viens dormir, mon amour. Je t’aime donne moi ton coeur ce soir” – “Don’t Talk to Strangers” (Springfield)
Burkey (Plaids), Jerry Chapman (Mediocre Bad Guys, Vagabond Saints’ Society), Doug Davis (Plaids, Mediocre Bad Guys, Vagabond Saints’ Society), and Corky McClellan (Plaids, Mediocre Bad Guys, Vagabond Saints’ Society). With guests like Clay and James, you can safely assume that the program for this show is going to skew heavily in the direction of rock ‘n roll. You may see me get involved in the music part, too. We’re also very happy to have comedians Cabell Wilkinson and Zo Myers on board!