I was digging around on the Youtubes late last night and stumbled upon the page of the sound engineer that my former band and I worked with. Turns out he had recorded a lot of gigs and has a ton of footage from most of them, which is great for me because even though the band isn't together anymore and we've all moved on to new things (both in music and in life- I believe these clips are from fall 2011), watching/listening to myself play is extremely valuable and a great way to track progress within the actual application of playing an instrument: playing music.
So, that being said, I'll give a couple discrepancies. Superstition is a bit... well, let's just say there may have been some liquid courage involved, because the tempo was much to quick for my liking. One thing about this band is even when I started a tune, and after a few other guys came in, the tempo would either pull back or push forward. It was tough to get in sync (usually about halfway through the tune) with everyone and finally be able to hold one tempo down. I, personally, think I'm overplaying but overall I'm content enough with the performance (obviously) to dedicate a thread so all your impending and judgmental eyes/ears can watch and comment (take that last bit with a grain of salt, lads- all a bit of fun with my fellow jazz snobs!
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). The second tune is a song called Demons by the band Guster. I had never heard the song before playing it with these guys and I really dig the arrangement that we used. I was going through a lot of emotional/personal stuff at the time (probably most easily reflected by how pudgy I am in the videos and how I stopped caring about getting my hair cut, yadda yadda, yadda) and I think that it shows. For what ever reason the song spoke to me and it was one of my favorite ones to play in the set. Granted, there's some intonation issues with the guitars and some of the vocals (not to mention there's actually another vocal part to the song I wound up singing, though I didn't know it well enough at the time of this gig), but I think from my aspect the playing is there and I'm "in the zone" in terms of serving the song and the passion behind it.
Yeah, it's all far from perfect and there's a few messy parts here and there, but still, it's always a learning experience.
Now that all that is out of the way, here are the videos- happy critiquing! (Oh, I suggest headphones/decent speakers. Sadly we didn't have any overheads and only had the snare and kick mic'd.)
