!!! My first practice session with the band ... !!!

The praise band at church, that is. ;) No headbanging R'nR, but a few upbeat tunes that definitely get the every-other-Sunday's crowd tapping their toes.

I was nervous as heck, ... but, to my surprise, I did okay! :D

Background: As some of you might know from my recent post, I was asked to play bass in the church band despite having no prior bass experience, which I made clear to the leader. But almost two years of guitar and some diligent study of forum member Kirk Lorange's PlaneTalk methodology (based on chord tones) gave me a bit of confidence. I bought a bass, practiced some of the tunes on my own, and accepted the leader's invitation to come out and jam with them this evening.

While I brought my gear, I had told them that I intended to listen and take notes rather than do much playing. They were okay with that. But when they told me the first song they wanted to practice, "Beautiful One" by Tim Hughes, I knew I could at least hit the root notes on time. So I fired up Mustang Sally and played along. Not bad, by my own estimation. I hit one clunker note and ran through a repeat sign ( : || ), but otherwise did okay.

We played seven songs in total, three of which I hadn't heard before (and for which the leader hadn't even given me the music) but they were in the same key so it wasn't hard to play along - I'd just follow the chord changes and punch the root notes. Struggled on a couple of songs with more complex rhythms or faster chord changes, but overall I kept up and didn't throw anyone else off.

Interestingly, I pointed out that they seemed to favor the keys of D and E (especially E) - even songs written in A such as Chris Tomlin's excellent "Forever" were transposed to E. They hadn't noticed that before, but the leader commented that the vocalists struggled with the keys of G and A so they tended to drop down; they just hadn't realized that they went to E so often. To myself, I said - no problem - I'm just going to stay in first position and hit the open E and A strings! I'll get more adventurous with practice, of course.

Looking back at the evening, I get nervous thinking about it - yet I don't think I was as nervous at the time, once things got rolling. I guess I was so focused on the rhythm and the upcoming chord changes that I was too busy to be nervous. And the band members were very encouraging, too, which helped.

Overall this was a great confidence booster. I'm going to work on the song riffs so I can go beyond the root notes, now that I've got a better understanding of how the band plays. Hopefully next month I'll even go "live" with them on a Sunday morning ...

8)