For this week's edition, I decided to share a couple of songs I play along with the cover band, and for each one I'll chat about how difficult it was to learn on the bass guitar.
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son
I love this song, and it's one of those ones that I think most people can enjoy. While playing it in the pub, plenty of people have had a bop to it, because I think as far as songs go, it's not hard to move to it.
It's a fairly easy song to play, and I've found that with a lot of the songs in our setlist. I'm a big fan of all kinds of music and throw on a pair of headphones whenever I get a chance. But, sometimes while zoning out to some songs I rarely imagine how they're played, and just go with it, since joining the cover band, however, I've been pleasantly surprised with a bunch of them and just how easy they are to pick up.
From listening to this one, I just assumed it was going to be tough, but thankfully it wasn't and it's a lot of fun to play.
Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
I've been a fan of Joy Division ever since seeing the film Control when I was in my teens, I think as far as Biopics go it's one of my favourites, especially as far as band films go and if you've never seen it, I'd highly recommend it, even if you're not a fan of Joy Division.
The Bass player Peter Hook is brilliant, and I remember hearing before that he used to play his riffs higher up the fretboard so he could hear himself over the other lads during band practice, and that style of playing, I think, helped to give the band their sound.
I was a bit intimidated by this one when I went in to learn it, and I'm not going to say it's an easy song to play, but I was able to get the hang of it pretty quickly, although, it took a couple of weeks of playing it before truly getting the hang of it.
About a year ago I was uploading some gaming clips to TikTok, and I decided recently to record myself playing some bass covers of the songs and upload them onto my page, starting today, with this song.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJVYDrMB/ - Here's a link to the video, for anyone who has this Chinese spy app installed.
ABBA - Gimme Gimme Gimme
Who can resist a bit of ABBA when they're on the beer and someone cracks out a couple of tunes, I don't care if you're the biggest punk rocker or metalhead in the world, when Dancing Queen comes on, everybody is moving.
Originally, we were going to play Dancing Queen, but couldn't get the hang of it, something about the song just wasn't jelling, so we switched to Gimme Gimme Gimme, and surprisingly enough, it's a pretty easy song, although, I do get the occasional hand cramp because I'm not used to playing stuff like it. We do the little breakdown in the middle of the song in our cover, and that works as a nice rest halfway through, before coming back for a finisher.
The moment we played this song at our last gig, everybody was moving, and at that stage, it was pretty fresh on the setlist, however, now I think we're much more comfortable; it's all practice, and the more we play these tunes, the better we'll get at them, to the point that we'll be able to jam out our own stuff and have some fun with the songs.
We actually do that for a couple of the songs, like White Wedding, and Psycho Killer, and it's a lot of fun since we can kind of have a jam with the original songs and do something that feels loose and fresh.
Over the next while, I'm going to be uploading more and more covers to TikTok, and maybe other social media sites, but for the time being I'll just focus on that one and see how I get on, I may even upload some originals from the other band, and maybe some solo jams, if the mood takes me.