OTOH I saw a blues concert in the same club with two great german blues artist.
I understand where this comes from – a lot of musicians in jams just use too much volume – still I think that's a very limiting thing. But with such a small amp there was no chance to play a clean chord loud enough to be heard over the dynamically played drumset and (loud) bass. I like a clean tone, maybe with just a little bit of hair. While that would have been a wonderful experience if I'd love distortion IMHO my tone was far away from what I wanted. Last time i jammed (in a small club) I had to play through a 6 watt tweed princeton amp with an 8" speaker. The guys providing them love "overdrive" and "distortion" often also driving them with additional overdrive, distortion or even fuzz pedals in the front end. Lately there has been a trend in my region to use smaller and smaller amps as backline in local blues jams. The fact that I was somewhat of a novelty-a skinny white kid who played harp and sang like an old blues guy AND had no ego-made a lot of the guys want to play with me, and I ended up playing with a lot of cool, experienced guys who taught me the ropes as well as establishing my own reputation on the scene…add to that my Buddy was a similar-looking scrawny hot-shot guitarist who could eat your lunch but wouldn’t out of respect for his elders, and we carved out a niche for ourselves. Nowadays everyone has created their own personal genre (“ I only play post-punk apocalyptic minor key shoegaze with elements of bebop and fusion jazz, but in a country & western accent”) and they couldn’t play with another person to save their freakin’ life.īlues is basic and everyone should be able to bounce off of it-but it doesn’t have to be boring.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed in the last fifteen-twenty years that very few new players learn “Standards” that everyone knows and can jam to when I first started playing, everybody in Fort Worth knew variations of Ray Sharpe’s “Linda Lou” and SRV’s “Pride and Joy” and Freddie King’s “Hideaway” and Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” and the Allmans “One Way Out” and a few Chuck Berry or Rolling Stones tunes and so on…simple rhythms that led themselves to various types of lead instruments or even different lyrics so they would say, “shuffle in E,” or “a stomp in G” or “country rhythm in D” and everybody understood…people could add their own lyrics or change the nature of the solo and it wouldn’t be the same ol’-same ol’… If you’re tired of it, figure out a way for everyone to be able to follow along. At J&J’s (for example), if you were good, you’d get invited to play two or three (or sometimes more) songs…if you weren’t good, the single song would be cut short, you’d be thanked and ushered back to your seat. (2) Preventing “poorly played,” is the responsibility of the host and/or the backing band. However, they’d break out a one-chord John Lee Hooker boogie or the occasional country or rock song to break up the monotony…it wasn’t “60bpm 12-bar blues in the key of G” thirty times in a row various tempos, various keys, various soloists (harp, slide guitar, guitar, horn, piano/keys, etc) made for an entertaining night. Pretty much everything played was I-IV-V because that way everyone-rank amateur to touring pro-could follow the song. Granted, this was a great open mic night, with solid, established locally-known and/or popular backing bands being the backbone, but still-it was an invaluable experience. When I first started playing, I didn’t have a band-just a few guys who all played guitar-and my first experience of playing in front of an audience was singing and playing harp at an open mic night at J&J’s Blues Bar in Fort Worth (RIP, ).
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