Channing
Member
So, the singer and I have been friends way longer than he’s been in this band, and we generally like each other, once we even went on vacation together for two weeks and didn’t have any problems, but lately we’ve been having some.. creative differences. Basically he likes to change the songs all the time without telling anyone. A couple days ago it was our last rehearsal before a show and we start playing one of the songs and he just keeps motioning for me to play faster, and I knew I was playing at the right tempo per a recording we’d made a couple weeks before for us to all practice to. He wanted me to play it so fast that I had to completely change the drum beat because the entire feel of the song changed. Originally I had this cool marching snare beat with 16th note triplets, super slow and like a death march kind of feel but with the new tempo I ended up playing just straight rock beat on the ride, so boring and way way faster and just totally destroyed everything cool about the song. So I told him he was going way too fast and played the recording for him and he showed me some video he made of just him playing the song on his guitar and singing and it was like 20-30 bpm faster and I’m like.. the rehearsal before a show isn’t really the time for this but whatever. So we ended up playing it super fast and then adding this outro that slows down at the end with the marching snare beat. Like a compromise. Not sure how that’s going to sound but it’s the best we could come up with. Anyway, a couple of the other songs I’m asking him about the song structure, like, how many times do we play this thing before the song ends or whatever; and he said he doesn’t know and that he wants to vary it based on the crowd or how he feels in the moment. And then just cue us. I guess that’s doable but I kind of am embarrassed to get cues like that on stage because it reminds me of the white stripes how jack always cued meg because she didn’t remember how the songs went. It makes it look like idk what I’m doing. And it’s confusing.
Is this normal? To not know how your songs go until you actually play them? Anyone else deal with something like this?
Is this normal? To not know how your songs go until you actually play them? Anyone else deal with something like this?
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