First there was Ten things jazz musicians can learn from pub rock bands. This week, we complete the table-turning with the final installment of things our hirsute, hygenically challenged colleagues in the world of pub-rock can learn from the jazz brigade. If you missed the first two parts, don't even begin to panic because you can find part onehere. Handily enough, part two can be found here.
Right, on with the list. Numbers seven and eight are so closely related that I'm going to deal with them together:
Chords can contain more than two notes
A bass can play notes other than the root
This is one for all the 'indie' and 'nu-metal' brigade. If I didn't know better, I would think indie was short for music that was independant of any originality or deviation from the strict form of this irritating rock cliche:
Guitar part: Root and fifth 'power chords' in 'chugging' eight notes. If you're writing an 'anthem' then you are legally obliged to palm-mute the chords for the verse.Bass part: Roots in eighth notes. Constantly and unendingly, until the repetitive nature of the sound causes your ears to bleed and your brain to try and induce a coma.
This sound, so beloved of everyone from Nirvana through Greenday to Arcade Fire is the musical equivalent of the common cold - ubiqituous and irritating. Like a cold, it's not exactly life-threatening but it's highly unpleasant and the evolution of minutely different strains has made it impossible to find a cure so far.
Playing louder will not make it better
I know you won't believe this my grunge-tastic axe whackers and floppy-haired plank-spankers, but something doesn't get better because you play it louder. Whenever you make a mistake, the solution is not automatically to spin around and turn your amp up a notch.
Unless you achieve the unlikely result of playing so loud that you actually deafen everyone in the entire world, a wrong chord still sounds like a wrong chord when you play it at a higher volume. And while we're on the subject, don't think we don't know that all that fiddling with your pedals, amp settings and volume knobs during a tune is covering up the fact that there's a section of the song you never bothered to learn. We know you're pretending to be making crucial adjustments to the sound whilst you wait for your solo bit to come around.
Let's face it, whether you're on-stage or in the practice room, if a song sounds disjointed, badly arranged, rhythmically unstable and poorly executed, it's probably because it is - not because it's not loud enough. Trying to paper over the cracks by cranking the volume is like trying to disguise the fact that your flies are undone by taking your trousers off.
Oh and it's not macho or hard either - there isn't a 'hot chick' in the world who has 'tinnitus' at the top of her list of things that are most attractive in a man.
Don't waste money on a keyboard player
There are two kinds of keyboard players - those that can play and those that can't. The ones that can't all become synth programmers/producers. The ones that can all eventually turn into jazz musicians. It's unavoidable. Save yourself the aggravation and the cash and don't hire one in the first place.
Don't believe me? This is invariably how it works:
Firstly, if you get a keyboard player for your rock band, they'll always get shafted in the mix on gigs because your sound engineer will have no idea what keyboards actually sound like. In addition, years of riding the desk at ridiculously loud gigs have left him 94% deaf and he'll only able to distuinguish the bass guitar and kick drum by the thudding in his chest when the volume is dangerously loud. Once he's done this, he always turns the guitar up full as well to be on the safe side. Your new keyboardist doesn't stand a chance of being heard over that racket.
Secondly, your guitarist is not going to leave any space for keyboard parts - he's going to play in exactly the same way as he always does because once he's learnt a song that's how it goes. Any attempt to change his part will result in a total collapse of his prefrontal cortex and he will immediately leave the band to start his own 'project' which will consist of several shred-tastic medium tempo generic rock numbers and an acoustic ballad in G.
As a result of having no space to play in and being unable to be heard anyway, your keyboard player will find his entire contribution to consist of a piano introduction on a ballad, a string part in the bridge of your most 'anthemic' number and a long 'atmospheric' sustained synth-pad chord at the start of the last number of the night. Everything else he plays will make no difference at all.
Once he realises this, you'll find he becomes increasingly distant. He'll start to look for music containing keyboard parts which a trained rhesus monkey couldn't learn during a coffee break. It's only a matter of time now before he's sucked into the black hole that is prog-rock. You'll know when this has happened because he'll start trying to get your guitarist to play three note chords and bringing tunes he's written to band practice. All of these will be in 9/8.
After a couple of unhappy years trying to convince everyone that Genesis are musically as historically significant as The Beatles, Keith Emerson is as significant a composer as Beethoven and that Rick Wakeman is God, he'll stumble across jazz - probably via 'Headhunters' or a Weather Report album. His final journey to the dark side will soon be complete and he'll be lost to you forever.
Six months later, you'll see him around town with a goatee, an air of intellectual superiority and some manuscript paper containing lots and lots of complicated looking chord hieroglyphs. You'll have a short and awkward conversation during which he'll look slightly embarrassed and deliberately not introduce you to the people he's with. Is that.
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