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I did something I Was Avoiding

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(@rparker)
Illustrious Member
Joined: 20 years ago
Posts: 5480
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My brother in law, Dave, came down this weekend. He's played for 35 years, does gigs, the whole works. What I've been avoiding is playing with him. It's like he's so good and I suck kind of thing.

So, an hour after he gets here I find myself up in the bonus room with him. Both amps fired up, he on my LP and me on my Strat and we just started playing stuff together.

We started off with Melissa, me on Rhythm and me on lead, and I was nervous as heck. After that, he asked me what else I knew, so I grabbed my trusty keefo-caster and started belting out some Stones. My 13 year old walks in and assumes the position behind the drum set and joins in. All of a sudden, he's doing the lead/fills for a few stones songs while I'm doing the Rhythm all while my son is on the drums. We sounded good as heck.

Having after a while exhausting my open-g catalog of Stones tunes, I grab my Ibanez with the hotter pick ups and Dave belts into this blues swing thing. I jumped right in with my limited knowledge, mick found a good beat in seconds and off we were doing the blues for a good 1/2 hour.

Then he says to me, "now you do the lead". Yeah, Right. He asked if I knew the pentatonic scale. I said yes. He pointed out the root notes and said just make <crap> up, and work your way to and from the root notes. It didn't take me five minutes of playing to really start getting into things. I was vibrating, bending, hammering, pulling and sliding like I had been doing it for a year instead of 5 minutes.

We played for a few hours until Mick's arms were falling off altogether that night. What an absolute blast.

Roy
"I wonder if a composer ever intentionally composed a piece that was physically impossible to play and stuck it away to be found years later after his death, knowing it would forever drive perfectionist musicians crazy." - George Carlin


   
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