Effective Cover Band Rehearsal Strategies for Success

[Music] what is going on everybody i'm adam johnson and this is cover band

confidential the conversation you're about to hear is an excerpt from the cover band confidential podcast where we

talk about rehearsals we had one of our fans reach out and ask us what we thought

about rehearsal schedules and in the process we talked about a lot of things and covered a lot of ground

so if your band is just starting to get back out there i think this is a great conversation to have

and hopefully you learned some tips and tricks to make your rehearsals more productive

just wanted to take an opportunity to thank everybody for tuning in if you are enjoying our content don't

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on sale link for that is gonna be in the show notes now with that out of the way let's get

into it switching gears we're gonna do some listener stuff the main one being one around practicing this is

from our buddy russ hello adam and dan i recently emailed you guys

asking about pay to play gigs and you gave me some great info now i'd like to ask you

about cover bands having regular weekly rehearsals my band level up rehearses every monday regardless of whether we

have a gig or not they rent hourly which is kind of an issue 23 to 25 bucks an hour reserving

three hours per week you're looking at 75 bucks just to rehearse so you can see how this can get pretty

costly absolutely lately it seems practices have become unproductive his question is do you

think it is necessary for cover bands to have regular weekly rehearsals i personally think that if everybody

does their homework quotation fingers then we should only have to rehearse transitions from song

to songs maybe work out vocal harmonies to give you a little background where relatively new got started about nine

months ago didn't fully settle into the current lineup until a couple of months after that there's

two questions here so as a cover band if you're established how often should you rehearse also if you are a cover

band that is just getting started how often should you rehearse all right so russ pointed out one thing

i was gonna leap in on but he went ahead and did it for me when you were describing this question

you used the word practice yes and i want to draw a real strong distinction between practice

and rehearsal right practice is a thing you do at home you do that in the privacy of your home

where you learn your part you figure it out you got to practice in order to be ready

for rehearsal rehearsal is a thing that takes place in a group and so russ's language and this

question was dead on all the way through he was talking about rehearsal the whole way

through so the question is about rehearsal but i just want to step over like if people are using rehearsal

to practice that's a problem that's a problem yeah we don't we don't like that we got

to deal with that we got to do it and that's one way rehearsal can become unproductive

so people are learning their parts on their feet in the rehearsal room that's not great

so when i got this question i immediately went into the patreon slack channel mike

schulte of the park tornadoes you know they've been around for a really long time so like we

rehearse maybe two to three times a year but they have a certain regimen around sound check and stuff

because they play very regularly so for him they say that they um they start their sound check with the same song

every time and they end their sound check with the same song every time and anything in

between is going to be two to three tunes that they're kind of working on

that's how they onboard new material because they're playing so regularly that is what they've done now

the difference between a band like the pork tornadoes and level up is that the pork tornadoes have

been around for you know 10 plus years at this point and so all of the kind of dynamics

between members and how the stage show works most of those things have already been

established they've done that work so for them it is just kind of like an onboarding process

so what i had said is that you should rehearse as much as you can manage you know there being a financial

component kind of plays into that to a certain degree but i also i'm of the same mind that

you will learn more as a band just getting started about what your band is about by playing

on stage in a show environment than you will in a rehearsal

for sure for sure in terms of tightening a band a gig is worth three to five rehearsals agreed yeah

so you know and there is some baseline of good enough you got to get to yeah you know don't don't skip the first

five to ten rehearsals but the sooner you can get on stage and the more frequently you can get on stage

the tighter you'll get faster now all of that said the thing a new band

is doing in the rehearsal room like it looks like you're learning material together

yeah right it looks like you're honing those vocal armies that's not really what's happening

what's happening is you're learning each other and i would say the most crucial people learning each other are

the rhythm section the drum and bass because the the more time they spend just making noise together just making

sound together the tighter their groove is going to mesh the the more

in sync and in the pocket they're going to be together and that is what is band tightness whatever we guitarists

and we vocalists do i mean you know adam are both guitars and vocalists but we're sort of over top of

the the the engine room of the band which is the foundation yeah yeah

well that if the bass and drum isn't in sync those two players aren't in each other's brains and in each other's

pockets that's really what makes a band tight and that that can happen in the practice

room and that is a function of hours spent in the practice room but again you know once you to a place where you're

not gonna cringe to put it on stage too badly a little cringe is okay actually

but not too badly you learn a lot better in a gig environment than you do in a practice room environment is it

still worth practicing every week yeah i think so yeah i think until you are generating shows under your own

steam yeah i think you still need to spend the i would call it discovery you're kind of

feeling the dynamics out the term that kind of came to my mind as you were talking about is like

it's basically a study in electrical engineering because you're trying to determine where the energy lies

and how to harness it i like that and that happens with different parts of the group and

different segments of the show yeah you know for for members only i feel like

most of like quote unquote choreography or like stage moves and stuff those all happen organically in the

moment yeah and then just we kind of took note of them to recreate in the future very few

things i feel have developed in the rehearsal room other than just the general competency around the

material and maybe in the guitar solo you you go down the octave in this one section

or the harmony stack is you know these three notes you're there to do the fine tuning

the performance stuff and the stuff that i think matters to the audience is still probably going to happen in front of an

audience largely yeah and you know the the thing i'm talking about in that happens in a rhythm section the

gelling of a rhythm section isn't at all what you just said right the details of how a song works or how

the harmonies work there's something very personal and non-verbal

and i can't quite describe it not having ever been a drummer or a bassist maybe they have language for it but

yes well let me let me go ahead and yeah so the main thing about rhythm sections and when you're talking

about tightness it's basically the bass player understanding where the kick is dropping

in and making sure that they are in line with when the kick is being hit in my particular case like i just did that

bass gig for the church thing and it was a matter of listening to what the drummer is

playing and making sure that if i'm if he's doing stabs on like the

two and and the four that when i'm playing whatever chord changes i'm playing i'm doing it in conjunction with

what he is doing yeah so there is a awareness that those players have

with one another yes and it is little details like that but it is a lot of the bass in the in

the in the picture i'm like lining up most of the players i've played with i'm not sure that language

is where they find that relationship i think it's about learning each other and i'm those of you

not watching this but instead listening i'm putting air quotes around learning each other there is

something very intangible that happens that's magic between a racist and a drummer that

makes them into a unit that's really really powerful and and that is a thing that can happen

i i say it happens five to seven times more more fast more fast it's not quite

english but more fast more faster on the stage than it does in a practice room

but it's still a matter of time to playing together to to to get that it also depends on a lot of

factors you know if you're a band that plays to a click there's a lot less intuition involved it's very yeah it's

much more mechanical yes so if you are in a group that doesn't play to a click and it is

very much like you know everybody's kind of following one another then you do need to have a

bit more of a situational awareness around these kinds of things yeah yeah and and find that

place of synergy versus the clicks giving me the place of synergy let's just play to it right

the other thing is the cost of the practice space so my solution is i have rented

a a storage unit in interior climate controlled storage unit and it runs 190 a month

so you know i'm i'm well out ahead of the price that that you're getting charged by the hour for

for that um i can store pa and other gear there and if you can work out a spot like that i really really recommend

it there are a lot of storage unit kind of places around that are looking for bands part of the part of the reason

is turnover of renters in the storage unit business is like

the cost comes from people churning coming in leaving all of that and bands tend to stick

around tend to have they also if they don't they tend to grab their gear

and leave the space vacated they don't tend to leave their crap and just disappear

absolutely you're not gonna find a band storage unit on storage wars nope it's not gonna be a thing a band is

a good customer for a storage uh company and so i would recommend you look around your space for a place you

can like a diy kind of space like that that you can get um you know when we first moved into ours

obviously playing in it it sounded like a coke can and i hung up a bunch of acoustic blankets on the walls and that

helped a lot warmed the space up very nicely and it's been it's been our home now for

three years and i'm very happy i wouldn't wouldn't do anything other than that i think it's i think it's totally

the way to go so if that can solve your pricing constraint and get you into where you can just do a

weekly rehearsal to get the band ready to get on stage i i think that's i think that's the way

forward that's what i'd recommend yeah i think that's right the space is is really crucial so

dan's idea is fantastic but on on the same there's there's other options you know in our

world because we do silent rehearsals i was doing it in a basement but theoretically i could do it

in any room in any house anywhere provided i had the the digital mixer and the

headphones so say just a little bit more about silent rehearsals so the band as far as guitars and bass has

always been direct before we started the renovation of the basement i had

an alesis nitro kit down there spent like 175 bucks on it on craigslist and with that in our digital mixer we

could do uh rehearsals with the kids upstairs without making a whole bunch of racket

and it sounds great to us and it's all very self-contained and all of that so if you can find a way to

one have a digital mixer two have direct amplifiers and three have digital drums and

ears or headphones so the point is you're all playing to to headphones or in-ears and so there's

no noise happening out speakers yeah and uh so it's very bedtime compliant for indeed children

and um it's not as expensive as you would think in order to set this up besides my guitar rig which i

already had i probably spent i'd say less than 300 on the

behringer xr16 and the alesis drum kit yeah so it's not as cost prohibitive as one

might think and it was definitely worth the investment yep so um the question how often

reverse prompted just a whole range of sort of answer-ish stuff yeah you know you know the the general

consensus is as often as you can if you can do it once a week that's great if you can't that's also fine

as much as you can handle until you get established and once you're established you know you do it kind of less

frequently if you could do it in our case if you get to a point where you're

you're gigging a couple three times a month that's your rehearsal you know it's

really not necessary yeah you may you may want to get together to onboard new material

sure right but that's different from like rehearsing that's that's uh that's that's a different kind of work yeah and

i mean if you are playing regularly there's no reason why you couldn't literally add a new song every single

show sure based on the workflow of showing up working through a song that you've

already practiced because we've already talked about that going through it at soundcheck and then

playing it the night of that show and then once it's in its end in conclusion there is no right answer

it's really just as much as you can manage given the resources that you've got

and the more that you do it the quicker you'll get to where you want to go there you go

you