Practice and Drills

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As of today, my next jam session is scheduled for Thursday evening in Willow Street PA. Thus far only myself, and our bass player have confirmed that we will be attending. Hopefully we can finally get this thing going, and try to turn this thing into something resembling a band.

I know that I need to show up with a solid game plan, so we don't waste time standing around and looking at each other and saying "okay, what do we do now?". I am actually going to go so far as putting a few bullet points on a note card so we can have a clear agenda. Hopefully, I can get the other guys to buy into my game plan.

First off, I actually want to avoid writing songs during practice until we become tight as a band. Everyone already has some material they have already been working on anyway, so we can spend some time teaching each other those songs and riffs. Also, I eventually want to agree on a practice time where we can get together for at least 2 hours every week. I also want to see if everyone is one the same page with our goals. Personally, my ultimate goal is to quit my day job and tour.

If I can't get everyone on the same page, I will just have to keep my involvement limited to occasional casual jam sessions, so I can allocate my time and resources elsewhere. I hope that is not the case, but I am not going to try to push my dreams on other people who don't really share the same goals. In the meantime, I am just continuing my practice routine by myself at home.

As of tonight, I am starting a program of drilling with scales, modes, and arpeggios. Right now, I have a guitar exercise book that uses 25 different scales and 25 arpeggios. This includes 5 major scale positions, and 5 each of natural minor, melodic minor ascending form, melodic minor descending form, and harmonic minor. The arpeggios include 5 patterns each of major, minor, dominant seventh, minor seventh, and major seventh chords. I realize that this is only the tip of the iceberg in a sense, but this should give me plenty to work on for a while. I want to memorize and become fluent with all of these pasterns, and then practice applying them in various real life situations, so they all eventually come naturally to me.

I have definitely been getting into a rut when it comes to composing lead guitar melodies, and I think these exercises will help alleviate this problem. My goal is to break the monotony caused by only knowing a couple scale positions, and not really knowing how to effectively apply my knowledge of most of the scales I do know. I will let you know how this goes.

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From the Ashes of DOS

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This morning, as I was lying in bed, sleeping in a little late because this is my day off, and I have no particular place to be, I got a phone call. I didn't get up and answer the phone right away, because It was right around the time my boss would have been calling me if he wanted to come in and work on my day off. That wouldn't be a bad thing, I could use the extra hours, but it is my day off, and at the very least I felt I was entitled to take my sweet ass time getting to the phone. So I check my voice mail, once I pry myself out of bed and scrape the crust off my eyelids, fully expecting to here a Guitar Center manager asking me to come in and work, and mentally trying to calculate how long it would take me to get dressed and get on the bus, when I here the voice of my old friend Joshua Mertz.

Joshua and I had been talking over the last few weeks about him coming out to Mulberry and jamming with Paul Lambert and I, but I had kind of forgotten about it since the break-up of DOS. Anyway, he wanted to come out and jam today. So I called up Paul, knowing he would probably be working at Mulberry this morning, and asked him if he could let us in to the band room, to which he graciously agreed. Anyway, once Joshua and I got to jamming, it was clear to me that he is somebody who I need to be working with. I mean, we have worked together before, we gel well together, and we have a shared vision of were we want to go. Also, I noticed that both of us seem to have improved our chops since the last time we worked together.

After some jamming, and a coffee break, Paul Lambert took a break from working, and came down and jammed with us for about 10 minutes or so. Joshua and I both definitely had a good time jamming with Paul on drums, and I don't know about Paul, but he seemed like he was in better spirits than I had seen him in a while, so I hope he liked what was going on too. Anyway, I had a chance to talk to Paul for a bit, and he said he would be down for drumming on my new project. So there we go, All of a sudden I got a rhythm guitar player, I've got a vocalist, I've got a drummer, and I've got a lead guitar player (yours truly). Now all I need is a bass player, so my next stop after our Mulberry jam session was off to Guitar Center to talk to a certain bass player I know. After having a conversation with him, he was really psyched about this project, and has agreed to work with us, so I now have a full band again, and I couldn't be more thrilled. From the ashes of DOS, a new band is formed.

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