Actually playing . . . and not in my office?!?

[marnold***]

A woman in my congregation who has a beautiful singing voice asked if I'd be willing to play guitar to accompany her and a couple of other women from the congregation for a song for Good Friday. It's pretty straightforward--arpeggio cowboy chords more or less. I don't think the Jackson will be making an appearance. I'm trying to get my hands on an acoustic. She played it for me on the piano so I could get used to the meter. The music is hand-written and with a free meter. My only concern is that Holy Week has me VERY busy just to do my normal work, to say nothing of trying to nail the music. We'll see.

I've played bass in front of people on many occasions, but I'm pretty new to the guitar thing.

[sunvalleylaw]

Sounds fun! Good luck!

[Tig***]

Go for it! You can handle it, and the slight distraction may help the stressful demands easier to deal with.

We regret what we didn't do yet should have, more than what we did do and shouldn't have.

[Eric***]

Cool! You know, I still get nervous for public performances like that, even though I've played in church probably hundreds of times by this point. Good luck with it.

BTW, what do you mean by 'free meter?' Lacking any sort of time signature? That sounds like it would be extremely difficult.

[marnold***]

BTW, what do you mean by 'free meter?' Lacking any sort of time signature? That sounds like it would be extremely difficult.

The music was hand-written because someone made this up on their own. They wanted to get the ideas down more than anything else. The way it is written, there is no time signature basically. It's essentially 4/4, but there's some parts (like triplet half-notes) that don't seem to make sense. She played and sang it the way she sings it, which is more or less what I imagined it would be. A member here has an acoustic that I'm going to borrow. He's the same guy that's going to the Maiden concert with me in July.

I know from experience that I'm going to have to practice while wearing a suit coat too. Back in high school I played for our equivalent of a prom. I was wearing a tux but hadn't practiced with long sleeves to say nothing of a tux coat. I got some unwanted muting until I figured it out.

Maybe I should just buy an acoustic one of these days.

[Eric***]

Hmm. That sounds kind of tough, but if the meter changes are at least kind of intuitive it might not be that bad.

Just my opinion here, but I kind of doubt you'd use an acoustic that much. It's possible, but I find that I only bring mine out if 1) I can't use an amp or 2) I need to use it for some sort of quasi-public performance sans drums. If I performed a lot more acoustic-y music I'm sure it would be different. But I usually stick to electric, even after playing exclusively acoustic for probably 10+ years. Electric guitars can cover an awful lot of ground.

In the end, you know your needs/wants way better than I do. I guess I'm just giving you my experience to say that it's not as crucial as I would have thought. As always, YMMV.

[Katastrophe]

Yew can dew eeeetttt! Have fun with it!

[marnold***]

Mark this one "Saved by Spudman." I've used his technique of restringing Floyd-equipped guitars of running the ball-end through the tuning post and then trimming the string to the proper length. It leaves you with a little extra around the post in case a string breaks at the bridge.

What does this have to do with this thread? Well, we're going to practice for the first time tomorrow and I'm going to have to bring my electric because I don't have the acoustic just yet. I was practicing by myself tonight and my "A" came unraveled at the bridge. I'm due for new strings and have noticed some tuning irregularities. Now I know why. A quick snipping of the string and "borrowing" some slack from the tuning post and we were back in business. At least it didn't happen while we were practicing together.

[marnold***]

Well, it happened today. I've now completed two of three Holy Week services and I still of the third, most important, Easter sermon to write. My brain is tired.

Anyway, I think I can best describe my playing today visually:


My main problem is that I didn't anticipate how much my hands swell after I'm warm. Ye olde preachin' robe gets things toasty, which is fine, but my fingers swelled enough that they didn't move as smoothly past each other as I would have liked. I got better as I went along. In retrospect, I probably should have stuck with my Jackson. I'm used to everything about it. That extra bit of familiarity would have been nice. The members were complimentary. I could see myself doing something like this again, but next time it will be with my own guitar. Also, it would have been better before I preached. Preaching ~18 minutes from memory is mentally taxing. By the end of the service I was pretty wiped out. I also got the yips way worse than I thought I would.

I was going to record it with my phone but I got caught up in the moment and forgot. All for the best, probably.

[NWBasser]

Marnold, ouch, I know the feeling all too well.

Our band is playing a small tavern in West Seattle tonight.

I may need to borrow your picture...

[marnold***]

This also eliminated my desire to get an acoustic. If I wanted a more "respectable" (read: less metal/pointy) guitar, I'd look at something like this: http://www.glguitars.com/instruments..._Top/index.asp

[marnold***]

We tape all of our services so I swallowed hard and listened. With the singing, my clunkers weren't as noticeable. Someone might be fooled into thinking I know what I'm doing. I feel better now--especially since my Easter sermon is written and memorized.

[tjcurtin1]

Good for you, Rev. It's not easy to 'go public' - and I certainly wouldn't want to have to do it AFTER (or before, for that matter) undertaking something as demanding as preaching to church full of people. Good on ya!

[Robert****]

Good work. You pulled through and it sounds like you did just fine!

[Katastrophe]

We tape all of our services so I swallowed hard and listened. With the singing, my clunkers weren't as noticeable. Someone might be fooled into thinking I know what I'm doing. I feel better now--especially since my Easter sermon is written and memorized.

Outstanding! Guitar players are usually the most self-critical, from my experience. Most of the time, the audience doesn't know you made a mistake, and will tend to look at the performance as a whole, instead of focusing on some minor clams.

[Eric***]

Sounds like it went pretty well overall, marnold. Out of curiosity, had you ever played the guitar publicly before this piece? I know you've said you were in bands on bass, but I don't know that I've ever heard of you playing in front of people on guitar. Just curious, I suppose.

[marnold***]

Sounds like it went pretty well overall, marnold. Out of curiosity, had you ever played the guitar publicly before this piece? I know you've said you were in bands on bass, but I don't know that I've ever heard of you playing in front of people on guitar. Just curious, I suppose.

I thought I mentioned that, but evidently not. Yes, this was the first time I played guitar publicly. Well, a number of years ago I played a simple blues thing at a Mother-Daughter banquet we had here where you were supposed to talk about your hobbies. I played along to a backing track. It's quite a bit different too because in a band setting, one minorly honked note won't stick out so much. If you are the only instrumentalist, everything is magnified. Plus I'm used to playing an electric with 10s and jumbo frets. This was a borrowed acoustic with 12s and medium frets.

With bass, my fingers swelling wouldn't have been an issue. The frets are spaced farther apart and I didn't typically do much chording. When I played, I used to walk around the stage to work off that nervous energy. On Friday it had nowhere to go but my hands. The good thing is that I kept it off my mind throughout the service so I could do what I was supposed to without distractions.

I really forgot how different it is to play acoustic. My big concern with electric (especially with the levels of gain I tend to prefer) is muting the other strings. With an acoustic, muting isn't anywhere near as big of a deal. You don't, however, have a driven amph's compression to even out your attack.

[Eric***]

Yeah, I guess you did allude to it in your original post.

They really are like two different instruments, aren't they? I've never really articulated the differences to myself the way you did, aside from the obvious action differences, but that's a good point about the muting. Right-hand action is much different on an acoustic too. I think the action and the rhythm aspects are the things that really get me when switching back to acoustic. Oddly enough though, I think the idea that you really need to use your fingers to get a nice ringing tone is something that playing acoustic can drive home as well. Not the first thing I would think of, but something that I usually rediscover when playing acoustic.

Anyway, I'm glad it went relatively well for you. It's hard (for me, anyway) to do anything new in front of an audience. I feel like any new technique I learn will be learned twice: once on my own and once in a live situation. All of that is to say that I'm impressed that you did a good job with it, considering that you didn't have much/any experience on guitar in a public setting.