As some of you know by now, I'm a professional musician and through most of my career, the bulk of my income has been from playing in wedding/corporate party bands. I've done this for decades and though I always stayed involved in various jazz, prog, fusion and latin bands to stay sane and keep my passion for music alive and well, those bill paying gigs used to be kind of fun, especially when there was a cast of really good players involved. But that was then and this is now. I'm thinking about this today because last night I played with a "jobbing" band (that's what we call those kind of gigs in the Midwest USA) that I used to be in, but hadn't played with for over a dozen years. I was looking forward to it because there's some great players in that band, the leader/keyboard player is a nice guy with a cavalier attitude compared to most of those uptight leaders and I had fond memories of the (almost) decade when I was in that band. But I came home from the gig depressed and I'll tell you why.
I guess I need to preface this story with a little bit of history on this kind of work. Throughout the '80s and '90s, there was a LOT of it. There were weekends where I had five gigs; one on Friday, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. That's well over a grand for a three day work week, and with the cost of living in those days, I was doing fine, with a lot of time to pursue more artistic and creative musical endeavors. But starting around the new millennium, times started getting tougher for that kind of work; a trend that has consistently continued ever since. Part of it was the economy changing for the worse, part of it was the DJs gradually cutting into that work that once belonged almost exclusively to bands, but another part was the change in pop/dance music trends.
More and more today, the music going on behind the singing is largely made by sequenced synths and drum machines, with a lot of layering. The only way a band covering contemporary pop/dance music could come close to duplicating that sound is... you guessed it, to have sequenced synths and drum machines covering parts in addition to the old fashioned musicians playing old fashioned musical instruments. Usually, this is accomplished by isolating sequenced tracks off the original recording and sampling them. So now, everybody in the band is wearing in-ear monitors and playing along with a click track and all of these sequenced parts; it's kind of like band karaoke. The wedding/corporate band I play with fairly regularly started doing this a couple of years ago and it's really not much fun. So I thought it would be a welcome change of pace to play with this band I used to play with, because it was looser and way more fun.
But guess what? They're now playing with pre-made tracks too; in fact there were pre-made guitar tracks in there, which irked the shit out of me (I'm a guitar player)! Hell, I could've just stood there and mimed for the whole gig! Not only that, but they used tracks on the classic rock material too; stuff where that kind of thing should be against the law, for Christ's sake! But silly me; I should've known better. Every wedding/corporate party is either playing with tracks now... or they're deceased, or close to it. Heck, trying to play all that sequenced techno pop with a '70s or '80s instrumentation probably sounds to young people like playing classic rock with a Dixieland band instrumentation would sound to us geezers. You want to work, you have to supply what's demanded (and particularly at a wedding, most of the guests are twenty-somethings). But it sucks! The outcome is that from being hemmed in by all of those tracks, there's no room for the band to have any sort of personality whatsoever. We all sound the same now. We sound like the record, only with slightly different singers.
Thank god I've got my monthly jazz gig coming up in a couple of days! It's the equivalent of a prostitute having sex with somebody she's in love with.
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