Youth Band Shenanigans and College Praise Band Joy

So Chris (our youth minister) grabbed me as I was getting set up for sunday school this morning and asked me to be at the church for the youth and college praise band kickoff this afternoon. I’ve been wanting to get involved for a while, so of course I said yes. Josh, the college praise band leader, caught me at service afterwards and mentioned he “might” need me to play bass guitar, which of course makes me happy. Bass guitar is my THING, man, I was BORN with one of those in my hands.

I got there with my gear (Yamaha hum-single-hum telecaster knockoff and Peavey Vypyr 30w solid-state) and a Mt Dew, proceed to get comfy, warm up some and chat it up with the guys and Chris kicks off the meeting. Come to find out I’m going to be LEADING the youth praise band and playing bass in the college praise band. I hope I didn’t let the shock of the scope of responsibilities being asked of me show too much. Chris asked me to teach them a praise song and I had to answer honestly, “Dude, it’s been so long for me, I don’t even know any. Help a guy out…”

So he and one of the other guys (I am SO bad with names) on the college band showed me a couple of easy ones and I sort of fiddled my way through them with the youth players. The younger guys are alright, but are going to need coaching. Heck, I’m going to need to remember what I used to know about performing as a lead/rhythm guitarist and try to teach them that stuff, too. I also desperately need to find some appropriately simple praise music that is still uptempo and fun to play. The staid dreadnought anthems never work with the young-young crowd as far as I recall. I don’t expect to be playing Skillet with these kids, but something simple that is still recent would be nice.

So the first time we played through a song, I was sawing at the strings like it was an acoustic guitar and thinking, “why the heck does it sound so bad?” Then I remembered that these are electric guitars, lots of sustain, and that we were just muddying the signal by strumming too much. Mentioned that to Wes (I think that was his name) and got a good response, so I think I’ve got a lot to work with here.

We took a break, Chris went to talk to the youth guys in another room, and Josh, Logan (that’s his name!) and I got set up to start practicing for the college praise band. Let me just say that I haven’t felt that comfortable with a couple of guys, musically, in a long time, like a VERY long time. We kicked off with what I think was a Chris Tomlin song (I’ve been browsing through his stuff on iTunes and haven’t found it), and within three phrases I was in a groove, following Logan on the base of the chords he was playing and tossing in transitions and embellishments. The next song, he capo’ed to G#/A-flat and gave me a run for my money. Glad I’ve been practicing my scales, because this one was fast and the transitions I wanted to do skipped strings across 6-7 frets at a time, both up AND down. WAY too much fun to be legal, and my fingers hurt because of it. Then of course we went back to the first song… capo’ed to F! Possibly the hardest area to do fast bass-work, that one taxed me. My fingers HURT… but it is a great hurt.

Apparently we’re performing this Wednesday. We just met, and we’re performing in three days. Thankfully we’ve got some good chemistry going and have managed to slide into a pretty good groove. I think we’ll be fine, but to make sure, we’re meeting again Tuesday afternoon at 5:30.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited.

-Evan