Last month, I suggested a number of ways you can go about finding people to play with and, hopefully, eventually form a band with. When you start searching, don’t settle for the first people you meet, and don’t expect a miracle right away, either. Many a time I’ve found myself standing in a room with two or three other people, and we couldn’t play even a note together. But don’t get discouraged. Every musician you listen to has gone through this sort of frustration.
Doesn’t it sometimes seem like everybody who can play is already in a band? And since that’s the case, how are you ever gonna find someone to play with? It’s a Catch-22 situation. I never beat it, because in the end I found a band that was already making records and touring-they just needed a new guitar player. As I mentioned in the first column, I answered a bunch of ads, and nothing really came of it. But that’s not to say that my experience is typical-there are a bunch of highly original bands out there that totally have their own thing that got together by answering ads they found in their local paper or music store. Just don’t expect the first ad you answer to result in the band of your dreams.
While you’re trying to form the perfect band, you may be confronted by choosing between, say, an average drummer or bassist who’s your friend and a really good player who’s kind of a jerk. Who do you go with: Mr. Nice Guy or the asshole? My advice is to go with the former. There are two reasons for this: 1) The whole concept of a band is to grow together into something unique, and that’s not gonna happen if you’re not friends. The only thing that’s gonna save you from going insane on a six-week van tour is your ability to get along. Incompatibility is why most bands break up or people “leave” for no apparent reason. Whenever you see that good ol’ “musical differences” explanation, read it as “they hate each other.” 2) There are a million four-piece guitar/bass/drums/vocals-type bands out there, so sometimes it’s better to play with people who haven’t been playing that long and don’t have a well-formed style yet. They’ll probably be much more flexible, and this could give you a better chance of creating an original style.
That’s enough band talk for this month; let’s finish up with a playing idea.
Last issue, I mentioned that a cool way to spice up your rhythm work is to apply an all-out bend to a chord. The intro riff to “Real Solution #9” on Astro Creep: 2000 shown in FIGURE 1 is a good example of what I’m talking about. In this song I’m using a “dropped-D tuning” on a guitar that’s already tuned down a half-step from concert pitch, which means that my strings are tuned as follows: Db, Ab, Db, Gb, Bb, Eb from low to high. A lot of people assume that I used a slide to play this riff because I used one for “More Human Than Human,” but I’m not. I’m just bending a two-note power chord.
As you can see in FIGURE 1, I bend the C5 chord at the 10th fret up a whole step to D5. It took me a while to master bending the low E and A strings together by exactly the same amount at the same time, but by using two fingers (my middle and “pointing” fingers) for more bending control and power, I was able to nail it almost every time.
Another example of using string bending on more than one string to enhance an octave riff is the segue between the verse and chorus of “Feed The Gods” on the Airheads soundtrack. This is shown in FIGURE 2.
I bend each “octave” slightly with my “pointer” finger (low-E-string notes) and my pinkie (D-string notes). This creates a weird engine-revving effect. Incidentally, I also play octaves in this song’s solo. The “robot-baby crying” effect created with a wah pedal makes it sound even more like a dirt bike. Now apply creative string-bending to your own riffs to give them that psychotic edge. See ya.
So you’ve learned how to play some stuff and you’ve even written a few riffs. Now what? How do you play with another guitarist or bassist? (You probably won’t find a drummer for a long time-they’re hard to come by.) How do you even find someone to play with in the first place? As promised at the end of last month’s column, this is gonna be our subject this time out. I realize that some of what I’m about to tell you will probably seem painfully obvious but it’s stuff that took me a lot of trial and error and wasted energy to figure out on my own. There are the a few fairly sure-fire ways for you to find people to play with:
• Put up ads in a local “mom & pop” record store where they sell cool stuff. (Note: it goes without saying that your ad should list what bands you’re into and also state what you’re looking for.)
• Try to meet people who are into the same general scene at local gigs and clubs.
• Put an ad on your local guitar store’s bulletin board. (Note: this is a place where you should be hanging out all the time and bugging the owners, anyway).
• Place an ad in a local alternative paper.
Once you’ve found another player or two, you won’t need a wall of 100-watt Marshall stacks to practice together in somebody’s bedroom. All you need is a small amp (like a Pignose or a mini-Marshall) and maybe a stomp box or two to customize your sound-BOSS or DOD both make pedals that are durable, good-sounding and inexpensive. My first setup was a 10-watt Peavey Decade and a Pro-Co Rat distortion box and that worked out just fine until I was in an actual band.
A crucial skill to learn early on is keeping time, so one of the first things I recommend you do is play along with records to get used to the feeling of playing with a drummer. Also, nowadays you can buy an electronic metronome for about 30 bucks and that’s all you need to help you keep your jams solid-you don’t need a fancy, state-of-the-art drum machine.
Playing in tune together is also important. Bottom-of-the-line tuners by KORG or BOSS will work just fine. Actually, it’s kinda funny me saying this because I wasn’t able to afford a tuner until I’d been in White Zombie for a while. I used to just find “E” on records and then go from there. But nowadays, bands are using so many different tunings you can’t really do that! It’s obviously not that important to have a tuner when you’re playing by yourself, but as soon as you start playing with someone else you definitely have to have one.
Aside from a little amp, a tuner, a metronome (maybe) and your guitar-the initial stuff you’re gonna want to have in your gig bag when you play with someone else is a cable, an extra pack of strings (you’re definitely going to be breaking them) and a couple of extra picks because you’ll always lose them. And, if making noise is a problem in your house, it’s not hard to figure out a way to jam using headphones. Try plugging into your stereo.
Talking of making noise: there’s a good chance that your school will let you and your friends jam together in the music-room after class. I used to do that all the time, because it was the only place I got to turn up loud when I first started out and hadn’t gotten a band together or found a place to practice.
One other thing: if you find someone to play with and you live far away from each other or you don’t have much time to actually practice together, you can always trade tapes of ideas and work together that way. When I was in Japan I saw something that really tripped me out: in Tokyo they have this park where all the rock kids go every Sunday. Because they all spend so much time in school, Sunday is the only chance they get to talk to each other. Once a week, all these kids from opposite ends of the city turn up at the park with their gig bags, a battery pack and a four-track. Then, they record guitar parts on each other’s tapes so they can take it home for the week, study it and write songs “together.” It’s a really bizarre sight to behold, but totally cool at the same time.
And now for this month’s playing tip…..
One very cool thing to do to spice up your rhythm playing that a lot of people don’ t think of is to apply vibrato or all-out bend to chords. It makes your rhythm parts sound much more psychotic. You can hear me doing this in “Spiderbaby (Yeah-Yeah-Yeah)” [La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume 1] as shown in Figure 1.
It almost sounds like some twisted old blues riff-and it’s one of my favorite moments on that album. It’s a very simple thing to do, basically I’m just shaking the shit out of the strings the whole time.
If you’re expecting a typical instructional column from me, then prepare yourself for a shock. Since very little about being in a band actually involves playing the guitar, I therefore thought it was time for a columnist to address some real-world band issues rather than the usual “what Mixolydian mode goes over which chord best.” Before anyone panics, let me add that I will conclude every one of my columns by quickly touching on a playing idea or two. After almost every White Zombie show, there’s some guitar geek like me – the type of guy who spends the entire show hanging out directly in front of the guitar player, trying to see what pedals he’s using – who’ll ask “How did you get into this band?” Well, to make a long story short…I started playing guitar because I thought bands were really cool and I wanted to be in one – not to become a “guitar hero.” When I was young, I always liked groups who gave the impression of being a unique gang-like the Cramps and the Ramones, who looked like horror movie creatures that all came from the same planet. Once I decided I wanted to be in a band, I had to start completely from scratch ’cause there was no one to teach me how to do anything the right way. Even now, I don’t profess to be an expert about it since every band works differently and I’ve learned pretty much everything I know the hard way. Still, maybe I can give you a head start on knowing what to expect from the day you start wanting to be in a band.
Like a lot of people, I found that I couldn’t get anything going in my hometown so I decided to take the plunge and move to New York. As soon as I arrived I answered a bunch of “guitarist wanted” ads-but none of ’em came to anything. I suffered through a never-ending succession of failed encounters which repeatedly led me to give up, only to try again a week later.
After a year and a half of sheer frustration, my luck changed. One day, Rob Zombie was browsing in a comic book store, and the clerk asked him what was going on. Rob replied, “Our guitar player just quit, I gotta start thinking about getting a new one.” The clerk said, “I know somebody…” and gave him the guitarist’s number.
I was that “somebody” and I wound up joining White Zombie. At the time, they were already pretty well-established in New York and I was incredibly psyched to be in a real cool band, one that I’d often seen play and always admired. As soon as I met ’em they asked if I would quit my job to tour, and I said, “Of course.” I was so happy that I would have cut off my right arm if they’d asked. I gave up my job-a real cushy one, I might add-without a second thought. Our first show on that tour was in Pittsburgh, where we played to five people. Things gradually got better, although that first show was pretty disheartening. Soon we went to Europe, which was amazing: we were well-fed and housed in hotels and played to good crowds every night. I started thinking, “Wow! This is really working.” Then reality hit: the tour finished and I found myself standing in New York’s JFK Airport, jobless, homeless and wondering what the hell I was going to do next.
I ended up moving to our basement rehearsal space in Brooklyn. The place was tiny and full of thumb-sized flying mutant roaches that would land on me while I slept-in the drum riser. Everything I owned was stored in boxes by my stack. I did this for months on end; I didn’t really have a choice.
I finally managed to land a job on Manhattan’s Lower East Side delivering pizza. I was riding around on this big cast-iron bicycle that had been around since the Forties. My deliveries took me to some interesting locales, including Avenue D (hell); during the course of the job I got to look down the barrel of a gun twice. It sucked! (Note: Getting and holding on to a job when you’re in a band that’s trying to make it is tough. I’ll discuss this “do I eat or play in my band” dilemma in a later column.)
Lots of people believe that successful bands signed their contracts a few months after they formed and instantly began making millions of dollars. (Remember kids, when a record company gives you money, it’s only a loan. They expect it back. More about the grim realities of the industry in future columns.) People don’t realize that most bands have to endure five to 10 years of starving, sleeping in the back of a beat-up van in the middle of winter and carrying Ampeg 8×10″ bass cabinets up and down wooden stairs in the snow at two in the morning before they get their first real paycheck.
Few are aware of just how much blood and sweat bands invest in their careers, and how much harder than a regular job their work is because there’s no one there to tell you what to do and how to do it. There’s no guaranteed paycheck at the end of every week, either; it’s like being self-employed with no way of knowing whether or not you’re doing the right thing. The only thing that keeps people going is blind faith. There are no guarantees of success, no matter how hard you work.
All of this sounds a bit grim, I know. But if you want to “go for it,” if you want to be in a band, you should be aware of the grim side. Which isn’t to say that it’s the wrong thing to do. After all, you should at least try to be cool while you’re young, right? Even when I was living in that basement in Brooklyn trying to scrounge together change for a cup of coffee and a packet of Ramen noodles, I never regretted leaving my hometown, where all my friends were still sitting on a couch, smoking dope, listening to records and going, “Maybe someday I’ll form a band.” I was proud and happy to be doing what I was doing-mutant roaches or no!
Next month we’ll go back to the very beginning and talk about finding people to jam with. Now, let’s get to the lesson part of the column, and do a little playing.
People are always asking me about what I call “the chicken chord” in “Electric Head, Part 2” Astro Creep 2000…. The chord I’m referring to is shown in Figure 1 and it appears in the riff shown in Figure 2.
My philosophy on coming up with wacky chords is this: you can take your hand, put your fingers anywhere on the fretboard and the chord you make can be used for something, somewhere. That’s what’s so cool about the guitar.
The same thing goes for gear, too: you might have this really shitty guitar or amp lying around vegetating, but if you’re making a record, there’s probably a place on it where that one terrible sound will actually be cool! So try and hang on to all the gear you accumulate. Even the crappiest bit will come in handy one way or another-take my word for it.
When I mess around at home, I come up with all sorts of weird stuff, so I end up having a backlog of ideas and whacked-out chords. When the band gets together and something starts developing, I have a pool to draw from. I came up with the “chicken chord” when I was feeling around for weird chords the night before we wrote that part.
I just inserted that chord to make the riff sound more ominous. Many of the cool riffs I’ve used have come about in a similar fashion. I can remember figuring out one day that instead of playing the “Hendrix chord” [Figure 3], I could just play the bottom of an E chord [Figure 4] and the top of a G chord [Figure 5] together , which is how I came up with the “Thunder Kiss” chorus riff [Figure 6].
Apart from maintaining a backlog of weird ideas in your head, you should tape everything you do-always. A cheap Walkman with a mic is fine and, if you don’t have a guitar around at the time, record yourself humming it. Unless you’re the genius-type who remembers everything, you have to tape even your simplest ideas to remember them the next day.
Think how often you’ve sat in school, at work or in a car and thought of the most perfect riff in the world. And, because this riff was so incredibly simple and obvious, you knew you wouldn’t ever forget it. Of course, by the time you got home, it had fallen out of your head. You felt sick because you knew you’d lost your “Immigrant Song” or “Satisfaction” forever. If only you’d had that cheap tape recorder handy…
