Voodoo Blues Band

Garage Band 101A

As previously discussed in lesson 1, having a CD or Tape player available during rehearsal is an invaluable tool. The ability to listen to a piece of music as a group makes the song’s learning curve a little easier.

If your band wants to get tight, all members must practice the material of a given song at home. You can’t take the chance of leaving it up to each member to be responsible for gathering their own material and practice at home. To solve this problem a band usually designates one member who is responsible for making copies of cover songs for each member to take home and practice along with. That designated person would have to put forth a bit of effort in order to burn individual songs from CD’s or download Internet tunes from their home PC’s and burn a CD full of cover tunes for the band to listen to. Some bands even swap and share digital files such as mp3′s or flash drives full of songs.

This also advances the song learning curve by allowing each member constant and easy access to current material and a resource for further reference.

Another method to advance the learning curve of a particular song through individual practice and supplying the entire band with that song in an instant is through Google and YouTube. You can use this tool to e-mail videos to each member’s personal computer. Now, how easy is that?? Through the use of Google, band members can sit in front of their computer and watch the video while they practice the song along with the audio.

Now, assuming that each member has a computer at home, the designated “song fetcher” can e-mail each member the video. Google has access to literally googillians of videos, some of which are not worthy of a distant mention and some are not worthy at all. Some videos are homemade tutorials, a lot of which aren’t worthy of mention and others are of “the average Joe garage-band guy” video taping him/herself performing their best rendition of another artist’s song. Once again, some of these videos are not worth the “click” and others are extremely good.

I’m telling you all this because I truly believe that by using quality videos you can sometimes watch the original band perform the song and you can pick up playing tips along the way. Whether you are a drummer, guitarist, pianist, bassist or whatever, watch & learn, listen & learn. Use current technology to your advantage. Make it easy & fun for your band mates to practice at home. Then when rehearsal time arrives, everyone will have listened to or hopefully have viewed, how the song is to be played. It really is a valuable practicing too; USE IT!

In the next lesson, we will discuss how to utilize these original recordings as song structure, then tweak the arrangements to suit your playing abilities and styles.

Keep practicing and I’ll chat at you soon.