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Lance just forwarded this to me. So true. The worse the player, the more noise they make before the show starts.
From: Bobbe Seymour <sales@steelguitar.net>
Date: Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 9:14 AM
Subject: Bobbe's Tips
To: lancebakemeyer@wildblue.net
Hello fellow players,
As a steel guitar player or musician of any kind, have you ever gone to work with a band that’s never heard you, or subbed in a strange band that you have never played with and felt the need as you were tuning up, to play some fast, gargantuous lick to let everybody know what you could do before the first song of the night started?
This may sound like a funny question but think about it. Notice how somebody that’s sitting in with the band will overplay or play his best licks as he’s tuning up before the band starts it’s nightly performance.
This is an observance that I’ve been making in my last several years of being a picky band observer. I will go to a steel guitar convention somewhere and notice how the hottest licks I’ll hear an amateur steel player play will be in his tuning up portion before his first song is being performed. Then I’ll watch an old pro setup, tune up, turn around, count the song off and away he goes into his first beautiful composition.
This kind of makes you wonder how the human mind works. We all want to be accepted and prove to the rest of the band that we have dexterity to do what we were hired to do. But playing your greatest lick or the fastest scale that you can play before the evening starts is not the best way to show that you are equal to the job.
I have even heard fairly new musicians to the recording studios in Nashville do this kind of thing. I try to figure out who they are trying to impress. Possibly the singer? Because this kind of thing does not impress other experienced musicians. What really impresses producers and band leaders is how you can hear the chord changes, weave nice fills in and out of these changes with a great taste and tone.
It goes back to remembering what you were hired for. You were not hired to play fast silly licks before the song or between songs, but you were hired to play with taste and tone during the song without playing on top of everybody else.
If all musicians realized this, there would be an awful lot of better sounding bands in the United States. At least in the studio, the engineer can cut all this clutter out and other musicians can be hired to overdub mistakes at a later point in time.
As I sit here trying to think of something else to share with you, my wonderful friends, I realize that I’ve had amnesia as long as I can remember. Like the guy that asked me the other day, “What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?”
I replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
4:59 PM
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