I traveled to Carmel yesterday to play with Brothers of the Road, an Allman Brothers tribute band organized by Steve (the guy in the center of the picture).
Steve (guitar player) has a big beautiful house out in the country, with a rehearsal studio in the basement, equipped on a level with studios in Manhattan.
My role was the Gregg Allman role, emulating the Hammond B3 organ sound on my Kurzweil PC2X. The Allman Brothers Band is a blues band, but with an unusual structure. The two guitar setup is a standard feature of the Chicago blues band. One guitar plays rhythm, the other plays lead. That means that one guitar always states the chord triads.
What distinguishes the Allman Brothers sound is that both guitars play lead in harmony. This leaves the stating of the chord triads to the organ player.
I thought I had it down pretty well from playing with the CDs. Boy, was I wrong! It’s one thing to play along with Gregg Allman, another to take over the role on your own. The standard blues tunes were pretty easy, but on the more stylized songs, I really struggled. And, while I’ve played a lot of the B3 sound, it’s altogether a different issue to play B3 all the time. You play almost entirely with the right hand, while you play the volumn slider with the left hand. It’s a constant struggle to get the sound level just right so that you drive the band at the right times, and stay out of the way of the vocals and leads at other times.
Finding my space in the band, hearing myself and getting into some kind of grove proved to be more difficult than I expected.
At times we did pull together and sound good. But, it’s back to the drawing board for me. I think that I’ll have to lay out some very detailed charts. Whew!
But, it was fun. I got to play for three hours with a band. The other boys (Hank, Chris and Bill) were very down home folks. And Steve served lasagna and beer after the rehearsal.
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