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Thanks, Marko! I have been trying to reach out lately and have been getting together every couple of weeks with a guitar player - we play a lot of blues/blues revival kind of stuff, but being a couple of children of the 80's, we inevitably get screwing around with stuff like The Clash or DK's and it's a lot of fun. Next weekend I'm going back to a blues sit-in at a pub up the road and actually give it a go, and I've been going to an open mic night for the past few weeks to try to meet some people. You're absolutely right - playing with someone else has really taught me things I didn't know I needed to learn and has really helped a lot. It's not easy - I'm not very good at going out and meeting new people - but there is a LOT of live music around here and really easy going musicians, so it's making it a lot easier; most of the people I have met just want to have some fun.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone around here - I have a lot of lost time to make up for and BBT has been absolutely crucial in so many ways. I learn something new everyday and not just songs - thanks again!

And now I will stop jabbering and let people get back to posting before I get yelled at for dumping out my purse and going way off topic.

Cheers!

Noisy again…

Took your advice and went to the blues sit-in group, got up on stage with a guitarist and a harp player I'd never met before and no one threw beer bottles at us. Pretty happy about that.

That was great. Getting up and improvising is really hard and I think more so for a bassist, a guitarist only needs to play chords and in this case, blues progressions which are a piece of piss. Next time you'll know your chops and you wont be sat at the back

I recently did an open mic, and like Jay said it's a great way to casually play with others and meet people. But what I found is that most guitarists play songs to their own timings and arrangements to suit their vocal style. Without a drum, throwing a bass into the fold was pretty challenging for me.

I learn songs as they're recorded, so when I played with a guitarist that told me they knew how to play (song-x), it fell apart when the guitarist decided to change a few chords to fit more with their vocals than how the song actually should be played. For example, there's a Toad the Wet Sprocket song (Walk on the Ocean), that I know really well. There's a guitarist that I know, who sings it very well. But when he plays his guitar to it, he completely goes off the rails on the verse walk up. He's playing three chords in his version that I have no idea what they are, and the song sounds like garbage when I play the bass as it should be played over how his guitar is played.

That's a minor annoyance that a bass player with a far better ear (I have no ear-playing ability mind you) than me can work around. I find it tough though.