DrumDoug
Senior Member
Hey Guys. I'm having a problem making a decision and thought I would get your advice. Basically, I'm rehearsing too much. I play in a top 40 country cover band, a blues band, every week at my home church, and once a month filling in at another church. I'm rehearsing 4 nights a week on top of gigging two or three times a month on Fridays and Saturdays. All this on top of a full time job. My wife is complaining that I'm never at home. I'm getting burned out. I don't have time to learn all the songs properly for any of the groups because I don't have time to sit down and practice. The couple of nights a week that I am home, I don't want to spend practicing and learning music. I want to spend it with my wife. So, I need to quit a band. I just can't decide which one. It's either going to be the blues band or the country band. They both have their pros and cons. The blues band has been together longer, but doesn't gig much. The gigs we do tend to be nicer because they are in the afternoons or early evenings. No staying up until three in the morning playing to drunks. Blues is my favorite style of music to play in general, but this band has it's issues. The leader likes older blues like Muddy Waters, and Little Walter. I like that too, but that's all we play. Out of the 40 or so songs we play, there are two songs with straight eights, and six slow 6/8 songs. The other 30 songs are all shuffles. I try to vary them up as much as I can, but there is only so much I can do when all the other guys are basically playing the same song over and over with different words. I've brought this up a couple of times that all of our songs sound the same and we need to find ways to vary up the set list. They are not the greatest musicians in the world, and to them, a slightly different guitar lick means the song sounds different. They argue that the records don't all sound alike, and I point out that's because it's different singers, different instrumentation, different players. We are the same guys doing the same thing on every song. The country band, hasn't been together too long, but it's made of better musicians. We gig more but it tends to be playing at bars, 9-1 or 10-2. That can be rough especially when I have to get up the next day at 6 in the morning for work or church. Because the country band is so new, I'm worried that if I pick that one, it might not be together a year from now and then I would be out of a gig all together. The country band has a lot more potential than the blues band. I was in a band with the singer before and we opened for some touring B and C level acts that came through town. I like both bands and don't really want to quit either one, I just don't have time to do them both. I'm leaning towards quitting the blues band just because it's not quite as good as the country band, but then I would really miss playing blues. If I quit the country band, I think I will miss out on playing a lot of really nice gigs and will be stuck playing shuffles all night long. Either way, I am going to let one group of people down, and I think that is the hardest part of the decision.