The Thousand Yard Stare

Before your band lands a billion-dollar record deal, makes a multi-platinum album and sells out “Enormo-dome”-sized venues, you’ll actually have to book and play gigs without any help at all from the industry (manager, booking agent or record company). Let’s take a cold, hard look at a checklist of things you have to have achieved before you get to play your very first note on a club stage:

You’ve managed to get enough money together to buy a half-decent guitar and amp. You’ve learned how to play. Or, more importantly, you’ve learned how to play something original. You’ve somehow found three or four other people you can actually get along with, who all share the same artistic vision as you, have decent equipment and can actually play. You’ve actually managed to find a place to practice (hint: drummers always have the coolest parents-hit them up first) or are lucky enough to be able to afford to rent a rehearsal studio. You can do this pretty cheaply by sharing a space with other bands-every town has a “music building” and you can usually get a room with two or three other groups on a “lock-out” basis for next to nothing. You’ve stood in said room facing each other and figured out how to play something together. You have a set-10 or 12 songs that you can play tightly as a unit. You’ve made a demo tape that’s good enough to convince club owners that they should let you play (or you’ve rented a theater or community center so that you and your friends can put on your own shows). You’ve managed to acquire a van or some form of transportation to actually get the band and all its gear to the venue.

That’s a pretty scary list of goals-do you think you have what it takes? Because only when you’ve accomplished all of the above are you ready to play in front of an audience for the very first time. How close are you right now? I don’t want to scare you, but it’s one of the most difficult things I can think of, and that first gig is a very distant end result. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing 100 percent, then do yourself and everyone else a favor-give up and go out and support the thousands of bands that are touring across the country right now. They need your help. Anyway, enough doom and gloom. Here are a couple of helpful hints that might help you meet your objectives.

Thanks to modern technology like low-priced signal processors/preamps (try Korg, Zoom, SansAmp or Boss), drum machines and 4-track cassette recorders, nowadays it’s pretty easy to do your own recording at home-you don’t even necessarily have to get a band together at first. If you’re the future resident genius of your band, you can write and record everything yourself and then go into a situation with other players and just say, “Here’s a bunch of songs, learn ’em.”

This approach may or may not work for you. Every band is different. White Zombie writes together as a unit-when it comes time for us to make a new record, we lock ourselves in a rehearsal space for eight hours a day and don’t come out until we’ve written it.

Last month’s column ended with us looking at the octave riff from “Feed The Gods” [from the Airheads soundtrack] that sounds like a motorcycle engine revving. The riff sounds this way because of the way I bend octaves played on the D and low E strings. Because my pinkie isn’t as strong as my index finger, I tend to bend the low E-string notes slightly more than the notes on the D string. This causes the octave notes to go slightly out of tune with each other and this is what causes the weird engine-revving effect. I often refer this type of dissonant “rubbing” effect as “skronking.” Here are two other examples of “skronk” riffs, both from Astro Creep 2000…

FIGURE 1 is the intro guitar riff to “Electric Head Pt. 1 (The Agony).” Because the whammy bar (floating bridge) kinda pulls the two strings differently, the unison E notes skronk as they’re being bent up to F with the bar. I also use a phase pedal on this part which definitely adds to the skronking effect.

FIGURE 2 is the intro to “Blood, Milk and Sky.”

There are a couple of skronks going on here-the ringing note on the B string at the 18th fret (F) rubs against the open high E-string note that follows it in bars 1 and 3, as does the ringing D# note at the 16th fret on the B string in bar 2. I used a Korg G4 Leslie Simulator pedal in the studio to add to the overall weirdness of these two skronks.

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.