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You’re Lucky, Because I’m a Great Singer
Written by: Steve Rasmussen
I sat down next to a guy I had never spoken to before. We greeted each other and then he looked at me with a grin and said “You’re lucky, because I’m a great singer!”
Now, I can get off key sometimes so I can’t be quick to judge somebody’s singing. However, when the church service started and we stood up to sing, it became clear very quickly that either he was just joking or singing on key was not part of his definition of a great singer.
What also became quickly apparent, though, was that he had an abundance of a very positive attribute. When we started singing, he took off at the top of his lungs and left me in the dust. He gave it all he had and got me pumped up because his enthusiasm was contagious. I started belting out the song the best I could, just to try to keep up with him. Even if I’d never heard the song before, his excitement about it would have convinced me that is was something I needed to sing.
I am certain that when he made his declaration of singing prowess that he was just having fun but one thing I had to admit, when it came to selling the song, that guy was a great singer.
It Was a Good Time to Shut Up
Written by: Steve Rasmussen
We needed a drummer. A high school student walked into practice carrying his bass guitar case. The band leader said we didn’t need a bass player which gave me a bit of relief since I was standing there with my bass guitar strapped on. “We do need a drummer, can you play the drums?”
The new arrival said he did and then sat down and demonstrated his skills. We were impressed. So the three of us did a rough pass through the three songs we were learning. Everything seemed fine as we were all concentrating on our parts.
When we had the final practice on the day we were to perform, we had added some more band members, a couple of singers, and another sound booth tech. There were 9-10 people there at this practice and this was the time when we had to really lock in performing with each other.
During the first song, the band leader noticed that we had a problem. My bass guitar line was not in synch with the drummer’s kick drum. Because the kick drum pattern was very simple for this song the logical conclusion was that what I was playing on the bass was causing the disconnect. So we had a discussion for several minutes on what I needed to be doing. Read the rest of this entry »
You Never Know Who’s Listening
Written by: Steve Rasmussen
We are told that a major component of good communication is to be mindful of who our audience is. But what about the people that we are communicating with that we don’t know are listening.
When I started doing guitar solos with the band at church I noticed a slight problem. If I wasn’t careful, a little adrenalin would get flowing and while I was concentrating on what I was doing, I would actually speed up and get ahead of the song tempo. It’s not a great feeling to finish what you are certain is the ultimate guitar solo only to realize that you are about two seconds ahead of everybody else in the building. Of course, that seems like an eternity when your only option is to try to look like you planned it that way.
To solve this problem, I decided that for the next Sunday that I would just listen to the lady playing the piano and follow her chord changes as I soloed. Fortunately, each musician has their own personal mixing station to plug headphones or ear buds into, if they want. Since each instrument has a separate channel in the station, you can select which instruments you want to hear more or less of. I turned down every channel except my guitar and the piano.
Everything went fine and because I was focused on the piano I was able to adjust my tempo when I needed to before I strayed too far.
Later that evening, the piano player and I happened to both be at a social event and were chatting about the music that morning. During our conversation it suddenly dawned on me that she had no idea that, of all the musicians and singers, I was zeroed in on her for the practice session and three services that followed.
It was a clear reminder to me that you never know who is listening when she said, “When we’re playing in the services, sometimes I listen to the bass and sometimes I listen to the drums. Who do you listen to?”
But Not All Of It
Written by: Steve Rasmussen
To say I got stretched is an understatement. It was a marriage of pure enjoyment with moments of terror when I recently filled the lead electric guitar slot at church for a couple of months.
In the typical set of songs that we do on any given Sunday, normally at least one song has some kind of lead guitar solo. It seems like I had just finished a series of posts on overcoming fears (What Did I Get Myself Into?) when I found myself right back in a scenario of having to shut up and walk the walk. As you can imagine, most of the time during a solo everybody is looking at the soloist. Sometimes my hands didn’t seem like they were going where I wanted them to go and the notes didn’t always come out as perfectly as I would have liked but the more I was exposed to doing it the more comfortable I got.
However, during this time I acquired a critic. There are a bunch of observations and lessons that I learned during those two months but for this post I’ll write about my new acquisition. Critic maybe too harsh of a label but it sets up the lesson I learned. Read the rest of this entry »
What Did I Get Myself Into? Part 4 – Show Time
Written by: Steve Rasmussen
The day of the big show arrived and I was scheduled to be the first performer. As the seats began to fill up, I realized that this audition was going to be a lot different then what I thought it was going to be when I signed up. What I thought was going to be a private event with just me and a few judges now had 100-150 or more people looking on. Then I saw the camera platform in the middle of the audience. Sure enough, when I got up on stage the camera’s red light was on and pointing right at me.
I greeted the audience and jumped into my instrumental so that I wouldn’t have time to think about it. The song begins with a boogie style rhythm to be followed by some lead guitar jamming. I had barely started when something unnerving happened. Audience members started clapping to the beat. I was startled because that hadn’t happened in any of my living room practice sessions. I recovered quickly but then realized that they were creating more volume than my little 15 watt amplifier. If they didn’t stop I was going to be listening to them instead of vice versa. Fortunately the perpetrators realized the same thing when I got into the improvisation and they stopped. The rest of the song went smoothly and I received some polite applause.
When I announced Chuck Berry’s Maybellene as the second song, I actually got some “whoo’s” from the crowd. It also has a boogie beat and the same thing happened. The audience started clapping to the rhythm as I got going. Of course, now I acted as if that happened all the time. The clapping stopped when I started singing the lyrics because the audience couldn’t hear me. As a matter of fact they couldn’t hear me singing even after they had stopped. Despite a sound check, the microphone volume wasn’t quite set up right. So several people in the audience took matters into their own hands and started yelling “We can’t hear him!” Read the rest of this entry »
