No Nets for a 3P w/V

Although my band is now "officially" a five-piece (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and voice), I've spent most of my musicial career playing in what's known as a three-piece and voice. In fact, my band will still occasionally play as a 3P w/V for smaller/less $$ gigs.

In this type of band the guitarist, if he's any good, wears about 20 hats every song. He's chording to fatten the sound while playing all the hookish and familiar guitar/key/horn/string runs. The bass player can't play just the written bass part - he has to weave around the guitar player and be intuitive enough to know when to fill it up and when to stick in the pocket. The drummer has to lock in with the bass player while also knowing when to drop in a fill and when to let the song breathe. Meanwhile, the singer belts it out, and depending on the amount of backup singers in the band the lead vocalist may have to jump from melody to harmony to unison chant to melody within a few bars.

This type of band is fun, challenging and somewhat dangerous (musically, duh). For example, if the guitar player misses a chord in a five or six-piece band, it often gets lost in the shuffle behind the second guitarist, keyboardist or horn section. Same with the bass player and drummer. Being surrounded by several musicians is a good safety net - they all produce sounds that help cover up minor gliches.

However, if only three guys are responsible for the sound and one guy for the melody, and one of them makes a mistake, it's HUGE. Even the smallest mistake - the singer going flat, the bass player missing a note, the drummer dropping a beat or the guitarist playing the wrong chord - is amplified. For me, it always feels like we're standing on a coffee table with wobbly legs and it kind of shakes and teeters before we regain balance.

If this happens for a prolonged time, it's disasterous for the band. A few years back we played a gig with a bass player who shouldn't have been on stage - let alone earning money to play music - to begin with. The guitar player launched into his solo, and the bass player (who at the beginning of the song gave a fey and arrogant hand wave when asked "do you know this song?") proceeded to demolish the solo section, playing changes in the wrong key while his "stupid" fingers ran up and down the fretboard like a pinball on crack. Man - about 35 seconds of living in the pits of hell, in front of a packed house. It was humiliating, infuriating and amatuerish, but mostly it made THE ENTIRE BAND look like a bunch of novice wannabes. (Thankfully, this particular bass player was humanely destroyed behind a barn. "Bass player, thy name is 'poser!' Ka-POW!")

So, there's no safety net for a three-piece with voice. Each guy has to nail his part or risk making the entire band sound unprepared. It's thrilling. It's scary. It's cool.

And, thankfully, with the addition of a wonderful keyboardist, it'll soon be a thing of the past.