rocketman Posted October 26, 2009 Share Posted October 26, 2009 So AXE® got me thinking when he put up the thread on the 17 year old wonder kid. I thought to myself, OK, how did I play back then? Unfortunately I don't have much of anything recorded from those days. I found a couple of clips though. The first is yours truly playing the Rhodes keyboard in our high school jazz ensemble. I don't do anything fancy here and I don't have any tunes recorded where I do some pretty good improvised solos. But listening it to it now makes me think that we were all pretty darn good, especially considering that we were all 17 years old and younger. Note our instructor "taught" us to be professionals, so we only practiced tunes a few times. We won every national competition except one (had one bad day). I was good enough to be accepted into Berklee and Eastman on piano, so I think I had some pretty good talent. This is recorded live. Note the cuts that our drummer does with the band at the 1:38 mark. He couldn't read music but had some incredible talent. All solos are improvised. So here's the good... [YOUTUBE] [/YOUTUBE] The drummer, bassist (who was my brother), lead tenor sax player (who did the long solo in the previous video) and I also played in a rock band with me on guitar. We just started playing out in bars and parties when we recorded this. I was 16 years at the time. I can't believe I'm going to let you hear this, but what the heck...here goes. We recorded this live on a 4-track recorder. Note I had just learned the EVH two handed tap and went a little nuts with it (overdid it). It gets really silly at the 5:00 mark (listen to the stereo panning). So here's the bad... [YOUTUBE] [/YOUTUBE] God I was an awful guitar player back then. But in my defense I was only playing guitar for a few years. Note that the volume swells in the first solo were done using my pinkie on the volume pot of my Sonex. I had to learn to do it that way because I couldn't afford a volume pedal back then. So that required some good coordination. But, wow, this is still bad overall. This thread will be deleted soon... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
milod Posted October 26, 2009 Share Posted October 26, 2009 Well... I was playing trumpet and a drum or two in my high school dual band - we switched a cupla players between jazz side and rock side. We weren't very good technically, but it was fun and I think we did "rock" because we enjoyed the opportunity and worked at playing as a band rather than as individuals. As I recall the only charts were for the jazz side piano player. Everything else was by ear and pretty improvisational. There was no music program at all in the school where I had my last two years of high school, so I envy folks who had the mentoring you mention. We hadda try to do it all ourselves at age 16-18. I hope this isn't taken as begging or "selling," but South Dakota's Black Hills State University has a heck of a music program that's almost hidden. You can even do a guitar major. I did a cupla stories on the head guitar major guy and he's good. They're also putting out some darned good music teachers who are real musicians who know how to play more than Sousa - and frequently end up staying on the Northern Plains in little schools to encourage kids. Just plan on having a good work ethic to survive. Except for some college music that showed how lousy my sight reading skills are, I've been in situations where I've had to learn pretty much on my own. So... A neat thing to me is that back in the early 1970s I did a little piece for Guitar Player on a guy who actually based his entire rural high school music program on what we might call "guitar music," rock and country. I think increasingly recent music classes in school are a lot more accepting and embracing guitar and that, my friends, is good. Rocketman, you wuz lucky! It sounds good, too... m Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturn Posted October 26, 2009 Share Posted October 26, 2009 That was good Rocketman More members should post that kind of stuff. Your playing was great, especially if you were only 17. Yeah, the stereo panning thing and the orgasmic part was a little over the top, but it's forgivable for a bunch of kids with a 4 track recorder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riverside Posted October 26, 2009 Share Posted October 26, 2009 I liked 'em both. I spent a lot of time in a jazz band playing both bass and bass trombone. Maynard Ferguson is still my hero. Never learnt to be a rock-god two-finger-tapping monster though - you gots me beat all to h3ll. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andre S Posted October 26, 2009 Share Posted October 26, 2009 I think my family thinks what I play is kinda screechy, they prefer acoustic, or really clean electric, ( nice fender tone lol) but even if they don't like it, I still have fun playing it and thats the important thing to me at least. And come on Rocketman, the playing was pretty good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeoConMan Posted October 26, 2009 Share Posted October 26, 2009 Yep. Good stuff! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChanMan Posted October 27, 2009 Share Posted October 27, 2009 Thanks for posting that Rocketman. I think this does an excellent job of demonstrating Thundergod's "what makes a guitar player suck" thread. You say the bottom clip is "the bad", but I've known gigging bands that would kill or die to be that good. I think I particularly like the eclectic mix of Van Halen and Rush.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Look! Im guitarest! Posted October 27, 2009 Share Posted October 27, 2009 Me when I was 16: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWityjlZ5tA And I'm in the highschool jazz ensemble. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
surfpup Posted October 27, 2009 Share Posted October 27, 2009 That was great, Rocketman! I enjoyed it. We all wore our influences on our sleeve at some point - and as others have said, the playing was really quite good. I love the idea of this thread. All my old junk is on analog tape though. I'll see if some of my old bandmates have anything digitized. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TommyK Posted October 28, 2009 Share Posted October 28, 2009 I courted my first and only Missus with "Sounds of Silence". Our HS marching band played stuff like The Sounds of Philadeophia (TSOP), Peter Gunn, and Proud Mary. We really ROCKED on Proud Mary. Brought home a lot of competition hardware too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dub-T-123 Posted October 28, 2009 Share Posted October 28, 2009 That was great. I totally enjoyed that. Some of the stuff in the second one was a little over the top but there was some cool stuff in there. By the way you pick fast lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guitargreg1993 Posted October 31, 2009 Share Posted October 31, 2009 i like it!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lowdown Posted October 31, 2009 Share Posted October 31, 2009 Have some songs from 2000 all done on an old 4 Trk. Fun stuff. Now I'm halfway through my latest solo project which is all digital. Good and bad in both. Analogue was more work but more fun. Digital is basically instantaneous. Not much thinking or prep. involved. Check out the Soundclick link below... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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