Lesson Three: Starting The Band

Lesson Three:  Starting the Band

There are as many different ways to play a guitar as there are hands on a clock, and for the same reasons.

It will only take a few seconds to figure out how to finger a chord, and then strum or bang away at it.

Learning an easy lead takes just some minutes.

Putting them together to resemble a song will take some hours.

By the end of the week you should be playing the bar scene and you should be filling small halls next month.  International superstardom six weeks tops.  Mind engulfing ego-tripping angst driven suicide optional at about nine weeks, if desired.

Back to business.

Once you have your ‘ax’ (heh heh) tuned (see ‘Lesson One:  Tuning Your Electric Guitar), and your scales memorized (see Lesson Two: Things You Won’t Practice but Really Need To) you will probably want to make some actual music (spelled m-o-n-e-y). 

Here is where the fun starts.

Call as many of your friends that have other instruments and tell them you are hosting a ‘jam’.

They will soon show up with alcohol and other inebriating substances, bunches of groupie type chicky poos, hair all over the place, bad teeth and worse English, oh, and instruments, and you will set up and have sound checks and ego conflicts before you know it.

Or, if your friends are like mine, you’ll end up with a couple of bucktooth geeks competing for first tuba in our new rock band ‘SwartzMega’, a heavy metal Tubafest of Ozzie proportions, featuring  a guy with a high hat and snare, with some Viet nam era shell shocked twitchy dude on bass (he only answers to ‘INCOMING!!’).

Since you are the band leader you have to make the hard decisions.

Tell the more expendable of the two tuba players he is now first harmonica. 

The other tuba player now becomes the bass player because, what’s the difference?

The bass player now becomes the rhythm guitar player, since he already knows what he is doing on a stringed instrument, more or less.

You say ‘One Two Three Four’ and everyone starts playing like mad; the record execs are lining up at the door on their knees with their contracts signed in blood, a yearning female sigh greets you everywhere, manly resenfulness begrudgingly acknowledging your obvious superiority follows you like a hound sniffing his master, life as an orgy of consumptive excesses defining your robust appetites.

With you as lead guitar player, front man, and vocalist, the band now takes off to celestial vistas, your name a household word for centuries.

Next:  Modestly Walking Among the Mortal Troglodytes