THINK YOU CAN PLAY IN A BAND?

Mixdown's readership ranges from absolute beginners to big time professionals. This article is for the former who aspire to be the latter. There comes a time when you start to look beyond the bedroom, garage, or whatever confined space your nearest and dearest have forced you into to practice your instrument. Up until that time, most of your experience as a musician has rotated around that little room. Maybe there's a stereo and a few guitar magazines, perhaps some instructional DVDs or some TAB books of your favourite albums. Quite likely there's a stereo. Your guitar playing experience is based on jamming to your favourite songs, maybe cranking out your own riffs here and there, and just generally having a heck of a lot of noisy, cathartic fun.

Then you and some mates decide to jam. You set your stuff up in a garage, choose a song and start playing. It's an unholy mess. But don't worry, everyone's first time generally sucks. There are many unique differences between playing at home by yourself and playing with a band, and you can't be expected to transfer one set of skills over to the other environment. Let's look at a few things you will realise the first time you jam with a band at full volume.

If you're not used to cranking your amp in your practice space. you might be in for a rude shock when you first nudge that master volume up past 4 in a band situation. The tone you had carefully crafted (if you're like me you probably marked your settings on your pedals in permanent pen ... oops) now sounds nothing like nothing what you heard at home. There are many reasons for this, including how the amp circuit reacts to being cranked up, and how the room sounds. You also open yourself up to the possibility of discovering feedback problems you may not have been aware of before such as overly sensitive pickups.

Some players find that when they turn up the volume, they lose some of the detail they heard in their playing at bedroom levels, while emphasising other things they might not have noticed, like the ringing of unmated strings and the bassy, reverb-like sound created by the vibration of the springs in a floating bridge like a Floyd Rose or Strat-style system. Because of this, playing regularly in a jam situation can be great for your playing beacuse you'll start to develop ways to combat this. I long ago developed a habit of turning my guitar's volume control down to 0 whenver i'm not playing. Whether its between songs or even during half a bar without guitar during a verse. If you make this a part of your plaing style from early on, it becomes a subconcious habit. and will add to the overall professionalism of your presentation when you're playing gigs.

As for the trem spring reverb wobble sound coming from your guitar, Steve Vai packs his trem cavity with tissue paper and foam to stop this. If its good enough for him......

Another thing you may find when the drums and bass kick in and your amp is cranked is that you might loose the impact of your notes, making it hard to hear what you're playing even if you're turned up loud enough to balance with the other instruments. The natural instinct is to turn up even louder, but if you're already perfectly balanced volume-wise, this isnt a good idea. Often, simply turning down the level of distortion, will increase the impact and presence of your notes, especially if you're using a valve amp. Valve amps typically get their distortion from two places (there are other factors influencing distortion but we'll look at these two for the sake of simplicity): the preamp and the power amp. Preamp distortion tends to be slightly fizzy, for want of a better term , and forms the main tonal character of your sound. Power amp distortion tends to manifest itself as an added warmth and punch to the tone, increasing the harmonic overtones and generally making the sound more direct. Power amps only distort once the the amp's master volume control is cranked, so often that the difference in sound that you're hearing at louder volumes is caused by the introduction of power amp distortion when you're playing at home, and you'll find that learning to cope with the increased clarity and strength of the amp's full volume sound will train you to become a more confident player. .