Back on the band front

[Undertoad]

With all this work, I am now able to read music....

...with my own notation in the margins of the score. I'll write out the notes in a simpler form. Some of the notation is fun, to musicians anyway: "Off to the pretty chorus" or "wait for snare dit-dit-dit" or "prepare for the fill!" or "Everything STOPS!" I'll write the lyrics in, if they help.

Then yesterday we rehearsed and I forgot my score! Fuck! But I had an un-notated PDF copy on my phone... thanks, Google Drive!... and wound up reading it, on the tiny screen... and did OKAY!

Thursday, with my score, I'll really be right on it, including what I'm calling "the pro riff", which just sort of... locked in. It's wild how that happens. This particular song contains a crazy riff involving all four fingers and all four strings over the whole song. It's VERY hard to get right, and judging by YouTube and other online resources... EVERYBODY FAKES IT.

Pretenders! Have you no pride! etc., etc. So I figured out how to play it correctly, and I play it every day, twice a day. And every time, I have to work hard at it; fuck it up most days. But as of yesterday, the muscle memory took over, and now I execute it without thinking at all. You want "Santa Fe"? Bam, there's the riff. Bam, there's the chorus.

It's technically the hardest song I've never had to play. "Ace of Spades" is actually harder but for rock-out reasons, not technical reasons. You can play "Ace" on one string, but playing it the right way still requires very hard work. It can draw blood.