I might be hitting my stride, finding my voice

So far, as I've tried to get myself up to speed playing in Rhianon, I've felt just a smidge overwhelmed and also, on a couple of very important songs, a little over my head. My strong suit is NOT the exact recreation of strange, complicated guitar parts. My approach to arranging has always been to find the basic essence of the song and then write my OWN strange, complicated guitar parts. Part of this was to give me a way around having to reverse engineer parts, and doing that gave me the added bonus that my arrangements were very original, and distinct, even recognisable once you grokked my style and aesthetic leanings.

So this has led to a smidgen of disappointment from Renee, who really wants to restore her old arrangements (and I can't blame her, they're REALLY GOOD), and a little bit of friction with the other guitarist, as he's slightly more wired into the "Learn it note for note off the recording and play it THAT WAY" style. One more smidgen of difficulty has come with Renee liking really precise rhythmic stuff, and actively disliking most of the "relative minor" and "6th/minor7th" chord substitutions that are the cornerstone of my playing style. And of course, none of these parts from two previous guitarists were ever actually written down.....So, on a couple of these numbers, I've been feeling that I was a bit behind the curve. Of course, that's not entirely true, because more often than not, Jeremy (the other guitarist) has been relying on me very much for how quickly I could find the key and basic chord progression for most of the songs, which he would then use as a starting point to THEN find the note for note passages by figuring out what inversions and variations of the chords that I sussed out were. I'm also developing more of a feel for the type of chord progressions that Renee prefers.

And Renee is starting to relax a little bit as our performable repertoire has expanded past 40 songs now. She's starting to get a feel for what songs will come together quickly, and is realising also, that the arrangements she wants WILL come back in time. The pressure of having to do this in three weeks' time was a little much. Alot of folks, even amongst my musician friends don't realise just how MUCH material you need to have to successfully play a bar gig. You can have a CDs worth of material plus a couple of songs to play perfectly fine 1/2 hour- to-hourlong sets at Renfest or some other festival type venue. And it only takes one or two kickass songs to really kick ass at an open mic. But to play a bar, or a wedding or any of those other workaday type gigs, you need at LEAST three hours of good stuff. It doesn't all have to be showstoppers, but if you want attention, it can't be background noise either. And you can't just fill up the time with the bare minimum either. If you play several weeks in a row, people WILL notice that you're recycling the same 30 songs and wonder if that's all you've got. Hence my constant frustration with how long it's taken some of the lineups in some of the bands I've been in to get up to speed on even 10 songs.
I've been wishing to swim in deeper water and Hooboy! did I get THAT wish come true! You may recall my initial trepidation.
And now, I can look back and note with considerable pride that in the space of only a little more than a month now, we've whipped more than 40 songs into "presentable" shape. And over half of them are entirely new to me! (and about 1/2 of the others might as well have been) And I have to honor this accomplishment. NO band or project I've ever been involved with before: Me & Nov, Sacred Chao, Wild Oats, Minor Mischief, 3LF, - HAS EVER put together that amount of material so fast. Even When Anne bailed on Wild Oats, most of the material we reassembled around her absence stayed essentially the same. And when we needed to get Christi up to speed on flute and keyboard for Lynne & Uri's wedding, we had 6 weeks, and padded our set with Dance tunes and Reels that she, Glenn and I already knew really well from the 3LF repertoire. Actually, I take that back slightly. Playing for John Barron in Good Company, I put together about this much material about this fast. But it was just he and I, and I was the only one playing guitar.
I had MOST of the songs he wanted to do already arranged, and most of them in his keys already. There were maybe 20 of the nearly 100 songs total that we did together that I either didn't know already or had to alter to play for him. So for Good Company, it was very much like snapping a few Legos together.
This Has NOT been that experience, it's been very intense, and very challenging, and until last night I really wasn't sure that I was truly the right person for this job. I've felt like a temp, coming in and keeping things going until the position was filled by the TRUE APPLICANT.

But last night, we finally made some breakthrus and I'm feeling like both Renee and I are finding the real voice that I can bring to this band. She really really digs "unique" arrangements which is, in fact one of my strongest suits. The problem so far, was that I was a bit sluggish precisely decoding someone else's really unique arrangement. But we're finally into some new material that has yet to have any stylistic stamp (for Renee) on it yet. And two of the numbers we worked up last night fit right into this trick I developed for playing songs in "Drop D" tuning where, instead of playing the chords openly or even with Barre chords, I'm playing parallel pairs and triads and moving them up and down the neck as the lower strings are used mostly as drones. (my guitar arrangements of "Nonesuch", "Mattie Groves", "Lily Of The West" and to a lesser extent "Norwegian Wood" use some of this technique- but my showpiece for it was an arrangement of "Scottish/Charlotte Bransle" that was positively eerie) Anyway, it's a NOT a common style for the guitar, it's more like playing a dulcimer, but the parallel, moveable voicings make it even bigger and very "modal" sounding. So when I discovered that this technique would work for these two songs I took a minute and put together approximately what I was thinking of, basially what I wanted to do but slowed down (it takes just a little time to play up to speed in this style, and the arrangements were very fresh)...And ... she loved it.

I've been unsure of whether I wanted to look at this band as a "job" or something that I felt some "ownership" for. This sort of thing could tilt that balance.

Anyway, our next gig is February 4th at a store called "Esoterica" in Leesburg VA, and we'll play again at Auld Shebeen on Saturday, Feb 11th. Listen for our brand new arrangements of "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" and "The Trees They Do Grow High"- the very first songs in the Rhianon repertoire to truly have a distinctly Maugish flavor to them.

Of course, coming home off of such a high, just HAD to be spoiled didn't it?

Even tho the van just had a tuneup and some electrical work done, there's been a bit of suboptimal performance from her. She's started being just a little bit tricky to start lately, sometimes sounding as if the starter solenoid is not pushing the starter all the way into place, and running "dark" inside. Last night, as I drove the 50+ miles home from practice, it being cold, I had both heaters running full blast and found it suspicious that the dash lights and the headlights too just kept getting dimmer and dimmer as time went on. Finally I got worried, and taking her other symptoms into account prayed that it wasn't the alternator totally dying, and that turning off the heaters would save enough power to get home.
So after I did that, between the ramp from the Beltway to BWpkwy and the 7-11 in Cheverly, things got alot less dim in the dashboard. I foolishly thought that I could stop and get milk. Nope. Mama Tiger would not start after I got back in, and it wasn't at all like the grumpy "Hey, I was asleep!" complaining that she makes in the morning. This was the "DEAD" battery clickclicklcl ick cli ck cleghhhhh noise.
I completely forgot that we don't have our other car back yet, so Sonya wasn't able to just drive the 1/2 mile and give me a jump start. And the ONE 7-11 patron who was even WILLING to give me a jump didn't have time to actually stay long enough to charge the battery. I hated having to call AAA for a problem that ONE good neighbor could have fixed, but call them I did, and they got me started. An HOUR LATER.

And then the punchline to all this when I got home: I openned the back to get my guitar and the milk I purchased (the reason for my stop), and the milk bottle tumbled out of the van, burst on the pavement and spilled out all but a single glass's worth. Wahhhh! I could have stalled out at HOME where I have a @$#%^%^@@ing
battery charger for all that!

So today, I get to go over to SEARS and see if they can test the battery to give me a clue as to whether IT's the problem or my alternator. I kind of suspect the battery, because it's not showing that it needs a charge when hooked up to the charger, and it's not been replaced since we bought the fan AND it seems a little scrawny and underweight compared to the vehicle it's supposed to work for.

Either way, it had better NOT interfere with my playing at New Deal tonight!!!

I think I'm bringing the battery charger and an extension cord with me when I go out today.