Grateful Dead Music Forum

A mate of mine who is a jazz guitarist does a lot of work with a string band doing Django Rheinhardt style stuff. Mostly rhythm playing but none of his chords have the root note on the bottom and most are voiced on the A through to B strings of the guitar only. It's all worked out to give the bass player room on the bottom and the lead players room on the top. His guitar skills are far beyond my own but nevertheless found it quite fascinating.

We had a kb player whose left hand would constantly fall asleep on the roots. I would hear this big root note coming through the monitors and pumping out the mains. I would start smacking my rig figuring it was my gear doing something bad. Drove me f'ing nuts.

Once I identified him as the problem. He just thought it was a big joke. Then he just did it to piss me off.

Wow. I'd probably walk over and unplug his keyboard mid-song.

Yeah well unfortunately, the guitar players found it rather amusing as well and we were on opposite side of the stage. I asked the sound man to take the kb out of my monitor mix. That worked well until the sound man got in on the fun and started pumping the sleeping left hand through my monitors at odd times.

I gave up. I just turned up to overcome the issue, problem was quickly solved.

Your certainly right, especially about it being him! 90% of any good musicians sound is naturally in THEM, their fingers, feel etc. Doesn't really matter what equipment Phil uses, Phil will always sound like Phil.

Equipment is a Big part of it thought...