Totally agree.

I've been playing Stick in a band setting for almost a year now. After spending my first few years with the instrument, strictly playing with a click track or drum machine, it was (and is) an adjustment, for sure. I suppose the biggest hurdle has been listening to the other musicians, while not getting too absorbed in what I'm doing with my hands.

Our drummer and I played together for many years as the rhythm section for a metal(ish) band. He started out playing side drum in his dad's (bag)pipe band, so he's got a really good fundamental base from that. Not overly fancy, but effective.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1AM-vXQDLM[/youtube]

He's actually really sick from food poisoning in that video, and had to be taken to the first aid tent right after the set.

My daughter plays drums and won't play with me. I played with her for one tune at a drum recital of hers a few years back. That will have to last me a lifetime. It was a total joy, I was so excited to be playing with her I forgot to be nervous. Funny how that worked. I think that would also be true if I played with any good drummer. I sat next to a drummer for 15 years playing jazz guitar in big bands and I miss that feeling. Maybe some day.

-Eric

I know this very well. I'm not very good at grooving (hey, I'm German ). But the worst thing I can do is to try new things while holding down a groove.That tends to throw me out of the pocket. As long as I'm on familiar territory, it's not so bad. So I guess that's another argument for knowing your stuff inside out.

A few weeks ago I played at a night club with a drummer that used an all electronic pads kit (Jojo Mayer style). For this I took my 36" Grand with my cello bow and some new amp/fx patches for dub step bass stuff (fuzz through wha filter alternating between fourths and eights triplets, and of course a tap tempo pedal to set the whole shebang in time with the drummer). It was great fun and will happen again!

Sounds awesome! Please get some video, next time, if you can. I'd love to see/hear that

I love getting really processed, quasi-electronic sounds out of my Grand. I like to use a lot of distortions, filters, delays and swells, especially of the bass side. So far I feel I've only scratched the surface. I use the PASV-4, and I'm having some issues with crosstalk and the overall tone of the 6th and 7th strings.

You could use a high pass filter on the melody side.

hey Nashorn.

I'm reading this post again this morning and a couple of things occurred to me.

Given my relative inexperience, changing up my groove within a song is a bit like pulling teeth. The classic situation is that I have to be able to play within my current abilities and not get hung up on what I can't do. I think that the pianistic nature of Stick makes it easy enough to drop the bass part for half a bar to flesh out a chording arpeggio or similar, just to relieve the tension of trying to nail a great bass part. Then it's back to more bass-centric stuff, hopefully with a simple right hand accompaniment.

The other side of this coin for me is imagining what different styles of music I want to be fluent in and then practicing at least one or two default grooves to make that work. At least then I can be fairly confident of getting into the music.

It's a bit like fore armed is fore warned, in a good way.

It's also what Jan Hellman said about being tentative, I've gotta go for it when the time comes and celebrate my Stickiness in a fearless way.

Yes, I play with a drummer - about twice a month.

In my opinion, or in my short experience, playing the Stick with a drummer comes very naturally. I believe this is due to the fact that I have not yet had a history on the Stick composing complex bass/melody pieces and/or just the experience I had in the last year playing bass.

Yesterday, for example, the drummer and I riffed on bass chord arpeggios, doing starts/stops and tempo changes on the fly, while the guitarist was hanging on for dear life! We had a good amount of "communication", which developed into very much groove-oriented passages. This was especially easy with two hands on bass, of course. I threw in some comp chords or short lead lines on the melody side, once in a while, in those times only hitting the root of a bass chord and maybe one other note - to give me time for the melody work. Of course, having a guitarist who can switch between rhythm and lead helps, too.

Having said that, it is far more difficult for me to play all-encompassing pieces on a Stick right now. I'm not there yet.

VT.

You're kinda lucky that you can't play an all encompassing piece and are more into jamming as it seems..

It's easy to get locked into note for note arrangements, than it is to play with people, if I heard you right.

May the Stick be with You.... Always