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Tonight, I had an audition with the Lloyd Dobler Effect. Phil, the lead singer, had sent me a CD of the group recorded at a live show earlier this year. The good news is lots of good-time music on it.
The not so good news about it is that I only received the CD yesterday afternoon. Twelve tunes on the disc, and Brian Buracker (one of Anthony's students, and a pretty accomplished player in his own right) playing bass on the tracks. While a number of the songs are fairly straightfoward, Brian is a pretty ambitious player, so quite a few of the bass lines are not trivial. To be honest, I think he overplays some of the parts from time to time, but it's still can be a workout.
Making the job a wee bit more challenging is the mix of the CD itself. For whatever reason, the bass sits way back in the mix. More often than not, I can hear some articulation (from the percussive nature of Brian's attack on the strings and fretboard), but I can't quite tell completely as to his note choice.
In other words, I was up to about 3am last night, trying to take notes on the songs so as to not make a complete fool of myself.
So tonight, I make it out to rehearsal, drag my rig in and wire up to a 4x10 that was already there. Phil and I were joined by Chris on guitar and Donnie on drums. After a small warmup, we got rolling. We went through In The Water, Radio, Sabrosa, Sold Out and Stranger. Given that playing with these three was the third time I had ever played any of these tunes (first time was initial stab, second time was taking notes), I played all of them very conservatively, hanging back, holding the groove and not really getting all that aggressive. I probably hung back too much, though. During Sabrosa, I lost track of where we were and forgot that there was a bass solo until there was only about three bars left. At that point, there wasn't much left to do except flail around a bit and try to catch up. I whiffed a number of other spots in other songs, but I think I did okay. We also just did a free form groove over two chords for awhile. It was pretty slow and moody, just moving back and forth with some nice breathing.
It was fun playing with the guys. Phil mentioned that they are checking out a few more bass players, so this will be another one that I suppose we'll see if there's a callback.
Posted by Casper at November 16, 2004 08:32 PM