[Music] What modern guitarist will never understand about playing live. Before backing tracks, modelers, and autotune, we had tube amps, sketchy stages, and a crowd that didn’t care if you messed up as long as you meant it. Most modern players, they’d fold in five minutes. Let me tell you what it was really like to survive a live gig in the real world and why it made us better musicians. Now, back in the day, especially in the bar band circuit or touring small clubs, here’s what sound check meant. Plug in. Y’all good? Cool. That’s it. No in ears, no front house guy tuning your tone. Hell, half the time the sound guy was the bartender or three sheets to the wind. The PA was mono. The monitors were just there for decoration. And if your amp went down, you weren’t playing. Period. No backups, no profile loading. And don’t even get me started at loading in through an alley behind a Chinese restaurant in the rain. Look, the reality is this, man. Back in the day, we got by with very little equipment, right? uh you know, one of my last gigs in Nashville, you know, playing in a 13piece band and in a tiny stage jammed in this hot space with no air conditioning and uh having to play 4 hours straight. Look, it really didn’t change a whole lot from back in the day. The reality is sometimes you can just walk into a situation and you know it’s going to be tough. That is what makes a live player better than somebody that just sits on Instagram in the comfort of their home and and goes, "Look at me. Look at me. Look at me." Look, man, there’s a reason why there’s uh a lot of uh YouTube players and uh you know, some of them even move to a place like Nashville, but yet they never play gigs, right? So, there’s literally guys that never played any gigs that are that are trying to teach you how to play that are trying to tell you what gear to use and all these different things. Let me tell you something. I don’t watch them. I may have watched them when they first came out and thought, "Okay, this is interesting." But what is this guy doing? Right? The reality is here on this channel, I had 40 years total in the music business, 30 years in Nashville playing gigs, realworld experience, and even if things got better over time, even if we had all of these advancements with modelers and in- ears and uh modern PA systems and, you know, having iPads and all this kind of stuff. Even though we had those things, playing live, sometimes you would find yourselves in very difficult situations, playing without uh air conditioning in the middle of the summer, playing 4 hours straight on a cramp stage with 13 people and not having a monitor. Okay? having to learn how to play in a situation like that. Having to learn how to survive on stage, not let it bother you. Right? Here’s the other thing. One of these divas, right, that’s uh used to hearing everything perfect and in their perfect environment and playing this. You have to learn how to not let the tough situations you’re in bother you. That is one of the the p most powerful thing I could say on this channel, man. You’re going to walk into situations if you’re if you’re a gigging musician, you’re going to get into situations where, man, it’s going to be less than ideal. And when I say less than ideal, it’s going to flat out suck from time to time. And that is the reality. But by getting through those situations, by working through them, by playing in situations, no matter how bad it is, you always put your best foot forward. You always play your best. You always give it your best effort. By doing that, by doing that, by learning through those situations. Look, ma’am, what do you do if you’re singing and playing guitar in a band and you have no monitors? Have Have you experienced that? I want to hear from all the people in the comments. And and look, man, I know it happens in modern day. Look, I know we’ve got in-ear monitors, but what happens if the in-ear rig goes down? Look, you could get upset. You could blow up. You could scream at the sound man and and all this kind of stuff. That’s not that’s not the road you want to go down. Look, I’ll give you I’ll give you an example, right? Sometimes you you end up playing a place, right, and uh you might be doing sound check and you’re asking the sound uh guy, "Hey, um can I get a little more keyboards in the monitor?" And uh you learn very quickly that the sound guy is struggling. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing. You’ve got all of this feedback and all this stuff. Man, I’ve been in some horrific absolutely horrific sound checks, right? And the re reality is this, man. Uh you learn very quickly, okay, this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’m not going to ask for anything. I’m going to try to get it to a point where the PA is not feeding back constantly. And once he gets it to a tolerable level, I’m not going to ask for anything. I’m just going to understand that this guy is not a very good sound man. He doesn’t have any training. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. And I’m going to have to just get by with minimal, right? I’m going to have to get by just like that time I had to many times that I’ve had to get by with no monitors. I mean, what do you do if you’re a singer and and this is your first time playing on stage and you get there and there’s no monitors and it’s a loud band? This is something that we learned how to deal with, you know, eons ago. And man, you know, it it never changed. Even though technology and things got better, the reality is you’re always going to have situations pop up that you’re going to have to learn how to deal with. Now, what I would do when I didn’t have monitors is obviously I would try not to play as loud and I I call it throwing my ears out front listening to what’s coming out of the mains hopefully. And I would tell this this is one thing you can do if you don’t have monitors. Tell the sound guy, "Hey, crank my vocal in the mains, right? because you’re going to have to literally I call it throw in your ears, but you’re going to have to l literally listen to what’s coming out of that monitor. Even though you’ve got maybe another guitar player, a bass player, a drummer, and everything close to you and you’re hearing that louder than everything else, you’re going to have to throw your ears out front and listen to what’s coming out of those mains because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to hear your voice. Look, these are these are lessons and experiences that you only get from being experienced. And just like, you know, guys like Jackamo Torah uh get exposed when they uh had to try to improvise because they’ve been stealing everybody else’s legs. Maybe some of these guys that aren’t out playing regular gigs, man, maybe if you threw them in a really difficult situation, they might not know how to handle it. But what did all of this teach us? The chaos, the craziness, the the uh not knowing what’s coming next, dealing with drunks, dealing with uh inebriated band members, dealing with sound guys that had no idea what they were doing, uh playing in rooms where the PA system was half broken, that half the stuff didn’t even work. Maybe you you’re a band with four singers and there’s two mics. I mean, all of this chaos, all of that uh crazy stuff that we dealt with, it forged monsters. You learned to listen not to your tone, but to the band. We didn’t tweak EQ, midset. We learned how to play each with each other, dynamics, feel, improvising on the fly because you had to. What do you do if your singer’s mic goes out and you’ve only rehearsed the song one way and you’re unable to improvise? What do you do if the mic goes out? Does he stand there and go, "No." If you’re a band that’s used to playing live and you can improvise, hey man, pass a solo to somebody in the band, you know, spontaneous improvisation. Hey, you’ve got to do what you got to do till they get his mic back up and running. And if you don’t, if you’re playing with inexperienced guys, they’re not going to know how to handle that. They’re going to they just think that a song is playing it, you know, start here and end here. And man, once you’ve had all of that experience, all that time playing on stage, man, it doesn’t even phase you. If the mic goes out, man, you just fill in the space. You just vamp on that section until it it works. Or you, you know, you take it somewhere else. Or you know what, last resort, you can always throw a drum solo, bro. Hey, give me some drums. I mean, look, man. These are these are things that you learn playing gigs, man. And it’s not uh learning how to uh speed up and slow down your playing uh on some uh app, right? It’s it’s realworld experience playing music, right? And that has forged monsters. Look, if a string broke, you kept going. If someone got lost, you followed them and made it feel intentional. It wasn’t pretty, but man, it was real. Now, look, I love tech. I’ve used modelers, in ears, MIDI switchers. They’re amazing tools. But here’s the catch. The more control you have, the less you’re forced to adapt. And when things go sideways, a lot of today’s players freeze. Too many players rehearse perfection, forgot how to feel the room. Everything’s to a click. Every solo is preset. And every mistake is seen as failure. But music’s not about perfection. It’s about connection. Look, man. The the best players in Nashville, they don’t even show up with a set list, right? They show up and they read the room. Why? Because it’s about connection. You have no idea when you’re playing a club in Nashville what your crowd is going to look like. That is the reality of it. You know, most of the time when you get to a gig, you have no idea how many old people are going to be there, how many young people are going to be there, how many Asian people, how many black people, all of these different things need. You need to be able to adapt to these different situations. And by playing guitar, you know, for for decades with different types of bands in different situations, man, there were times when I we had to lean heavily on R&B because we had an audience that loved R&B. There were times when the R&B I’d be in an R&B band. I’d be the one white guy in a band, right? And the R&B is not working. We were misooked. We were we were placed before the wrong audience. And that’s when the band looks at me and goes, "Hey, get us out of here." Right? And then I have to step up and and take the band in a completely different direction. Look, man, people who don’t have the experience, they would freeze up. They would fail the audience. Look, there’s nothing worse than forcing the wrong music on the wrong audience. It’s it’s just it it’s one of the worst things you can do because look man, the audience is not obligated to to applaud for you. The audience is not obligated to stay. And look, man, if they don’t stay, if they’re not happy with your performance, you’re not getting called back. That is the reality. We live and die by connection. That is what being a musician is all about. Now, here’s the deal. If you’re a young player or just someone who never got that trial by fire, here’s how to build that grip. Play a gig with just an amp and a cable. No pedals, no presets. Jam without a set list. Let the band communicate on stage. Go to an open mic with strangers and listen more than you play. Practice bad conditions. Loud drummer, offaxis monitor, out of tune singer. Make it work. This that is a powerful one right there because here’s the deal, man. I had somebody in the comments before say they had a terrible gig and they’re it’s so bad they don’t know if they can they want to go back and they they’re ready to throw in the towel and all of these things. Man, bad gigs are just part of reality. You want to have less and less of them. You want to be consistently good, right? You don’t have to necessarily be consistently amazing. That might be that might be a lofty goal because in reality of playing in bands, especially in Nashville, you’re going to have different players, you know, playing on the gig. You might be playing gigs. Imagine playing gigs and just meeting everyone on the stage five minutes before you’re supposed to downbe. That is the reality that musicians in Nashville deal with every day. Do you think it makes them tough? Do you think it makes them better? Damn right it does. Look, you’ve got to very quickly learn to adjust your playing, to adjust uh your feel. Look, man, when you got to play with a different drummer every night, man, that’s a different feel. It’s not always about the snapping everything to grid. It’s about snapping everything to to Bill or Steve or Toby or or whoever else is in your band that day. That is the reality of it, right? You come out of it tougher, more adaptable, and way more musical with all of this experience. And that is the reality. People will feel it, right? because you’re on another level. If you want to develop real world skills, then you’re going to have to get realworld experience. Now, look, you don’t have to give up your modeler or your digital rig, but don’t forget what it’s like to be human in the moment. When the power cuts out, when the band gets weird, when the crowd turns cold, that’s when you learn what kind of player you really are. Got a gig, horror story, a time where everything fell apart, but you kept going. Drop it in the comments. I want to hear it. If you haven’t had that moment yet, trust me, it’s coming. Hit like if you ever duct taped your pedal board together and subscribe for more guitar talk that actually gets it. I’ll see you next time. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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