h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd like a rhythm section that can drive without dominating, a guitar or keyboard player who knows the value of silence, and one or two natural lead instrumentalists (violin, clarinet...) who can pepper their improvisations with sweat.

Okay, Mund. Is this a real live band you want to start, or a virtual h2g2 band? And if it's a real one, where are you trying to start it? (We cover several continents, you know. )

Let's start with a virtual band.

I'd be more than happy to join if you need a drummer. I'm very laid back and rarely ever dominate, but I still can as hard as ever. I've been told I have a great sense of time and style for the appropriate song. If you think it sounds like I've got what you're looking for, you know where to find me...

Thanks Yossarian. That sounds like the feel I'm after. All we have to do now is work out a way to rehearse on the web.

If we can do that anywhere, this site is the place!

Just FYI, I've put a link to this thread on the Musicians Guild main page so more folks will be aware of the opportunity. Good luck, guys.

Cuul...


I'm ready to start when you are.

OK, this is how we're going to do this thing (I don't know why I let the little guy on my shoulder talk me into it)...

You each give me a spiel about why your own skills and personality would turn the virtual band into the greatest thing the world has ever seen.

Then I get drunk and make the wrong choice.

Then we all get drunk and sit in a virtual studio surprising ourselves with the brilliance of our output.

First off, I am virtually drunk quite often, yet this fortunatly does not hinder my abilities.

Second, I am one hell of a drummer. I can play any style you wish me to, and I can play it well. Plus I'm not overpowering, and have an amazing sense of control and dynamics, even during intense drum solos when I may just be playing sixteenth note triplets for three choruses.

Third, I am so cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month.

Oh, and I do have recording experience as well...

Overwhelming, Yossarian. A place on the short list is yours. As band assembler (I won't say leader until we see how people work together), I have to reserve the right to choose.

One drummer is usually enough, but what do you feel about working with additional percussionists?

By the way, my forte is singing, and I can do it forte (i.e. loud) if required.

I play guitar and keyboards well enough to introduce a song, but after that it's better left to the specialists. I'm not afraid to take the lead, but it's almost more fun to pick up somebody else's song and work out a couple of harmony lines. And not just a slavish third above.

I have quite a collection of more-or-less original songs, some of them three-minute pop items, some more complex than that, and experience of improvisation - solos and complete pieces.

The most fulfilling piece of music I've played recently came about like this...

A seven year old girl, temporarily in our care, was playing random notes on a glockenspiel - she'd never come across one before - and luckily she was sticking to the "white" notes. I grabbed my not-so-trusty flute (it needs a couple of springs replacing) and worked out a simple B-down-to-F-and-occasionally-D phrase which made it seem that we were really "playing something".

The smiles were really rewarding, and that was just mine.

I don't mind sharing the spotlight at all.

So long as the percussion section doesn't get too big...

There's nothing I find more annoying than an immense percussion section.


Unless we get into crazy Afro-Cuban music where we'd have thirty guys (or girls. good musicians know no particular sex in my mind) playing auxillary percussion; claves, congas, shakers, and such. That would be kinda cool, but seeing as how we most probably won't get into that stuff, just recieve this entire last paragraph as a useless digression.

By the way, who else did you have in mind for this band? Or am I the only one who's responded so far...

OK. Not to put too fine a point on it, there's just me and YP the drummer so far. But that's not a problem (fights back the tears). If the Jazz Cellar will sit quietly for a guest spot, I'll go over to the piano to play "Home was calling me".

A simple pattern of broken chords, a slow hi-hat beat with light, surprising fills on the snare will do to start with. YP will get a chance to be more demonstrative - but not much louder - later. "As the collared dove flew off between the trees", and I try to forget that this is probably the only song I've ever written that wears flared trousers.

Four minutes later, after five verses and a middle eight I forget to warn the drummer about, we come to the whispered climax - "home was calling me... home was calling me... a fool" and the joint collapses in indifference.

You try to tell a cool story. You mess up a URL. You feel like a worm. And where can you get a worm at his time of night?

I lost you some time back...

What are you talking about? And this is YP you are and have been talking to, just in case you didn't know...

But a good place to drink your misery away is at the Maverick Table in the h2g2 Legs. Stop by and share a beer with me sometime, yeah?

I know I was talking to YP, the only useful respondent to this thread. I also know I have to talk as if loads of other people will suddenly appear out of the ether and mutter "yeah", while tapping suddenly-discovered tambourines.

But if what I say doesn't come across right, I'll go back to the real, boring world and maybe never come back.

Er,

That's a bit drastic, don't you think?

Especially when it seems like we're on to something cool...

Hey look, I'm an artist. I have a right to over-react.

Looking at what we said last night, I think it would be rather interesting (if we ever met in a concrete world) to put together what you say you can drum and what I know I can sing.

Tomorrow night I have to support (as in play for) a worthy local samba band - there are loads of them in the northwest of England, it would appear. The drumming is great fun, occasionally inspiring, but we have a lack-of-momentum problem - different people each week, nobody can quite remember all the parts...

And our first gig, organised by over-zealous organisers who hope that the heat and scent of battle will pull the ragged troops together at the last moment, is little over a week away.

Our first gig?

Where, and when?

That "our" was a different "we" - the samba band. This evening's rehearsal was good but still a little bit out of control. When we gel (various parents, other assorted adults and a varied crop of kids) we drive like a train, but derailment is still too frequent.

I doubt if you're in the area, but we'll be rending the heavens with joyous sound on Sunday, around noon to one at the Edgeley festival in Stockport.