People Noodling Between Songs....

Exactly! It depends on who's doing the noodling.

 

It was a joke. Keep yer knickers on.

Geez...

 

Professional bands do not noodle between songs.

Some jam bands might warm up a little, tweak a couple of pedals at the beginning of the show but that's the only time.

Rock supposedly may not have rules but being a showman does.

Do it in my band are you get fined. Keep it up and you get fired. Go have fun in your garage not in front of paying customers.

 

That's the one that gets me. One of our guitar players had a habit of playing licks from songs we were going to play while setting up. Not a problem so much with our originals, but he would do the couple of covers we do as well. We beat the habit out of him.

 

It all had to do with your opening statement and for balance I thought it was just fair to throw out there the flip side of that coin.

Communication disconnect really seems to be that those opposed to so-called noodling are talking about noise-without-direction.

 

You're not even on the page started by the OP and I can only guess what kind of noise you make at gigs.

 

When you start to not care, it's time to find some inspiration, or go get another job.

 

Yep. And I have a stage-goes-completely-dark rule for a minimum of 20 minutes before downbeat. Everything goes silent and everyone LEAVES the stage until 2 minutes before downbeat. Then at the 2-minutes-till mark, every still stays silent until DB.

And noodling between songs? Forget fines. It's an appendage-decapitating offense.

 

やっぱり、不味い。

 

They keep paying......=job.

 

yup. My band always plays at least 3 songs as seamlessly as we can, with short breaks to tune (silently) while saying hi to the crowd.

 

When I was young and started playing guitar it was because I said “I want to rock!”....

I wonder if there were some kids who said “I want to rock... but in a professional manner, ideally in a $100/man cover band with a potential for $200/man gigs, and with a rigid mgmt structure which includes fines for any indiscretions”. ??? Lol


I get it though.... when I was a commercial photographer for about a decade I stated out doing my own thing, creative as I wanted etc, wasn’t about the money. If I wanted to cover a model in green paint and thought it looked cool, I did it.

Now there was a small percentage who got paid tons of money for their vision, and big magazines etc said “do what you want, we want your vision, here’s a big bag of money”....

cool if you can get that work, but the reality was doing catalog work for JC Penny.... you shoot the models they way they want, they don’t care for your vision, you don’t suggest paint etc on the models lol, but it paid the bills.

now peers who either were doing high end creative work, or maybe just shooting stuff they liked for fun, used to look down in my wOrk, it was boring and commercial, but it paid the bills.

so yeah, I guess if your thing is keeping gigs and making clients happy, keep on keeping on, BUT, those who don’t follow that path will likely have a hard time understanding why music has to be so rigid.

again, I’d rather see a guy like Hendrix noodle away, banter, come up with spur of the moment jams and improv etc any day of the week over a well oiled professional cover band doing flawless song to song professional sets, but I guess I’m not the target market for that type of thing.

I’m never going to book a wedding band, I don’t run a bar or club and don’t cater to the demographic who wants that type of music. I don’t spend each weekend in venues with that type of music running a bar tab, I’m simply not a customer of that type of music business, which is fine, as is being someone who is the demographic.

I do think think things change over time though. A certain demographic of musicians think noodling is bad, and there used to be tons of people who thought facial hair or tattoos in the business workplace wasn’t proper. Some still do, but as a whole, now it’s fine for guys to have beards, women to have visible tattoos etc.

Society changes, music changes, what people consume in music, how they consume it, et al, changes. Maybe a professional 5 piece cover band is becoming a dinosaur no matter how well they perform. Maybe the market is changing and drying up ? Guess do anything you can to grab as much of it as you can, but things aren’t like they used to be and never will again. Such is life.

 

Problem is too many players who noodle or banter like Hendrix have neither his talent or wit.

Fact is it's all about playing the room, something pros (who rarely noodle) are good at, and non-pros, well, they just continue to reinforce to crowds and venue owners that the same crappy $100-a-man bar scale bands have gotten 20+ years is somehow too much.

 

I liked your post but what Hendrix did had nothing to do with what the OP is about.

 

Yep. Kinda my point in my reply to the guy who brought it up.

 

I generally don't noodle between songs, but if there is a gap because someone is (say) changing guitars and I don't feel like talking, I'll play a short vignette (30 seconds) of something. People seem to like it, presumably because I'm actually playing a very short piece rather than just noodling around. Some of those vignettes turned into actual songs over the years.

 

Not at all. My attitude, when I'm playing a rock gig, is that I want the band to grab 'em by the throat, punch them in the face, and not let up. In a word, "relentless". That's rock as f**k, I reckon.

Time spent noodling is time not spent rocking.

 

Serious question.

Where's the concern coming from on the part of those who fear if someone in the band, while setting up, noodles on a riff from a song the band intends to play later in the evening and someone(s) in the audience hears it's a horrible outcome.

I can think of 3 possibilities - is it one or more of these or something else?

• The band loses the element of surprise with its set list.
• People in the audience who recognize the song(s) will say, "That/those song(s) suck, let's book [slang - rush out from] this joint now."
• The band will be deemed unprofessional as (it could be thought) no professional band warms up or does its soundcheck with music they actually intend to play that night.

 

Your post is the first place this scenario has been played out in the thread, so, not a concern. Cheers.