the heartbreak of trying to play with normal people

[Derelict78]

You guys just need to move to denver and start an ILF supergroup

I might. I moved to hawaii from Denver and in 10 months we may be coming back.

[oldangelmidnight]

This is my favorite thread ever.
I was in an Irish punk rock band and was kicked out for being too weird.
Before long, I'll get it together to stop just making strange noises in my attic and make strange noises with other people.

[Gone Fission]

I am this thread. And maybe worse. I've got a professional job, wife and pets, a mortgage, and I'm approaching if not already in middle age and look accordingly unhip. Makes it very hard to get together with like minded freaks, or disparate freaks appreciative enough of each other's freakitude. One of the big thing's is that a gig every so often might be fun, but I'm not interested in "making it on the scene" or getting "label interest." I just want to get together with folks and make noises.

So instead it's on my agenda to learn me some beat making and manipulation.

[rfurtkamp]

I stopped trying within weeks of owning a guitar. I'm just not normal like the cover banders of the world that represent 99% of musicians out there.

I found that it was best to find people and start my own projects, and make myself known where possible. Open mics with a good crowd where it's not all blues, etc. It was a *lot* harder before the net. Now it's a relative breeze to find people - I have a guy here in my town of 50,000 in motherfucking Idaho who's into wierd noise and whatever happens, happens.

Sure, it's harder than it was in Chicago etc with home recording nights and old timers with practice spaces and organized once or twice a week guaranteed gigs without trying, etc., but thankfully I went through the 'need to play in front of people' thing long before I turned into a reclusive cripple.

Every minute you spend trying to play with normal people who don't get it is a minute you could have spent helping someone who wanted to learn to make splattery noise do so on a cheapo instrument. Sometimes you have to train them yourself ;0

The other thing I learned was to describe what you do honestly when people ask the ubiquitous 'what kind of music do you play' question. My short answer is "Free jazz from hell", long form includes "It's noisy, with no set songs or anything that will ever be played twice, like a movie soundtrack for an art film gone bad."

[dubkitty]

the nice thing was that the woman from LA with the original material REALLY liked the stuff i was doing. i love it when people with their own material are open to letting people flesh out the songs with personalities that might not be part of the original template...i really enjoy listening to a song and going "this character is a creepy guy and the chords are kind of Tex-Mex, so it needs...harmonizer and Morricone fuzz with a little accordion-esque vibrato box!" casting the role as it were.

[dubkitty]

i'm working on that description thing. right now it'd be something like:

"odd guitarist, older than you, seeks interesting situation with experimental aspects.

i play electric, acoustic, and pedal steel guitars as well as bass, passable drums, rudimentary keyboards, and various other instruments, and also do drum programming. i like to use dense layers of fuzz, modulation, and delay/reverb effects with electric instruments, but also enjoy clean tones.

i've played in settings ranging from solo singer/songwriter to group free improvisation with the members of the first Vandermark Quartet, and have worked with proportional notation, graphic scores, Cage-style text instructional scores, etc.; however, i do not read standard musical notation without difficulty.

i'd prefer a situation more creative and interesting than a typical cover-band, and not strictly limited by the strictures of genre; i'm not averse at all to song-form, but have a deep and abiding love for improvisation of both the organized and free varieties. an electric group of vaguely rockist orientation would be my first choice since i've been concentrating on electric guitar lately, but i'd be equally happy to consider an acoustic situation, an electronica + stringed/treated instruments project, a position backing a truly exceptional singer/songwriter or with a really creative group, or just about anything that didn't require illegal or grossly immoral activity or bore me to tears. i'd even be delighted with a REALLY good straight-up 60s style honky-tonk country band, as long as they were willing to mess with the form a little bit. PLEASE, no Grateful Dead cover bands...i was over that thing 25 years ago.

my major influences, in chronological order: Stephen Stills. Pete Townshend. Neil Young. Jerry Garcia. John Cippolina. Robert Fripp. Mick Ronson. Brian Eno (treatments). Bob Mould. The Edge. Doug Hopkins of the Gin Blossoms. Kevin Shields. Jonny Greenwood. additional conceptual influences include Van Dyke Parks, Carla Bley, Charles Mingus, and Glenn Branca.

[The Mad Owl]

I have a small group of like-minded people with whom I make noise/discuss pedals/music. We had our first ever "Pedal Summit" which is what you would consider a fuzzy version of "It Might Get Loud" lol.

[phantasmagorovich]

i'm working on that description thing. right now it'd be something like:

"odd guitarist, older than you, seeks interesting situation with experimental aspects.

i play electric, acoustic, and pedal steel guitars as well as bass, passable drums, rudimentary keyboards, and various other instruments, and also do drum programming. i like to use dense layers of fuzz, modulation, and delay/reverb effects with electric instruments, but also enjoy clean tones.

i've played in settings ranging from solo singer/songwriter to group free improvisation with the members of the first Vandermark Quartet, and have worked with proportional notation, graphic scores, Cage-style text instructional scores, etc.; however, i do not read standard musical notation without difficulty.

i'd prefer a situation more creative and interesting than a typical cover-band, and not strictly limited by the strictures of genre; i'm not averse at all to song-form, but have a deep and abiding love for improvisation of both the organized and free varieties. an electric group of vaguely rockist orientation would be my first choice since i've been concentrating on electric guitar lately, but i'd be equally happy to consider an acoustic situation, an electronica + stringed/treated instruments project, a position backing a truly exceptional singer/songwriter or with a really creative group, or just about anything that didn't require illegal or grossly immoral activity or bore me to tears. i'd even be delighted with a REALLY good straight-up 60s style honky-tonk country band, as long as they were willing to mess with the form a little bit. PLEASE, no Grateful Dead cover bands...i was over that thing 25 years ago.

my major influences, in chronological order: Stephen Stills. Pete Townshend. Neil Young. Jerry Garcia. John Cippolina. Robert Fripp. Mick Ronson. Brian Eno (treatments). Bob Mould. The Edge. Doug Hopkins of the Gin Blossoms. Kevin Shields. Jonny Greenwood. additional conceptual influences include Van Dyke Parks, Carla Bley, Charles Mingus, and Glenn Branca.

I think you need to shorten it but I'd call!

[bigchiefbc]

I joined a hard rock / metal covers band about a decade ago because I just wanted to play out and get some experience. I didn't even really care what the music was. I mostly listened to techno / IDM in college, with a little bit of prog and industrial thrown in. Now I just keep playing with them because they're good friends and really good musicians. I still couldn't care less what music we play, as long as the crowd digs it.

I started my original band in 2007 with one of my best friends, and we share a very similar idea to what kind of music we want to make. This is really my main outlet for everything I want to create. Of course, the intervening time has been taken up with me getting married, buying a house, having a kid and now him beginning that same process. We've got a lot of great (I think so) stuff written, but recording has been painfully slow. It is still amazingly satisfying, though.

[Bassus Sanguinis]

I have quit playing with 'normal' people because I fear it might be contagious. Unfortunately, I've had to put up with a lot of 'normal' people working with my bands...

Not only have I heard pretty often that a mild overdrive can be a good effect for bass is used sparingly but I have actually heard a soundguy asking after the bands guitarist - when there is NONE in the band - because SURE there is a guitarist in the band, who's playing the fucking pedalboard if there's no guitarist - a bass player? Yeah. Hardy-fucking-har-har.

[Dandolin]

I post this link not to contradict your point, dubkitty, but because I watched this just before happening on your thread and found the Albinator's comments on normal people striking.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fer-KmCtdgQ[/youtube]


Reclaim normal now! Ride the escalator over the hill....

[oldangelmidnight]

On Normal:
Finnegan's paper began with the electrifying sentence, "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolph Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed." He then went on to demonstrate that the normal or average human lives in substandard housing in Asia, has 1.04 vaginas, cannot read or write, suffers from malnutrition and never heard of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald or Brian Boru. "The normal," he concluded "consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits."
from: http://www.rawilson.com/csicon.html

[mathias]

I want to be in dubkitty's band

[dubkitty]

i've never heard of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald. that sounds like the name of a dog that won Best of Breed at Westminster...Ch. Berryman's Silken Thomas Fitzgerald.