Playing again

For the first time in about 15 years I'm about to go out and play guitar in a band. I used to do this on a regular basis for years and years, playing about 2 or 3 times a week, but stopped regular playing in the mid 80's doing only the odd gig after that.

The background to this is that the charity Sheila volunteers for is having a fund raiser in a local restaurant and needs to provide some live music as an added attraction to get people along. The husband of another volunteer, Danny, plays guitar and we have spoken about all the ins and outs of playing on all the occasions we've ever met previously. He has two daughters who are both good singers and so getting together to form a band seemed like an obvious thing to do.

We've decided that as we're playing in a restaurant we'll do an acoustic set with him playing a 6 string and me a 12 string in order to produce a really full sound. This also means we'll have good control over the sounds and the girls won't have to compete with us forcing the sound levels up. After all, people will be trying to eat while we'll be playing.

The rehearsals have been working out fantastically but I'd forgotten just how much hard work it can be with all those arrangements and chords to learn, let alone the fact that I didn't even know a lot of the songs so have had to learn many of them first. With only two weeks to go we need to cram in three more rehearsals and we should be ready to go. If it works out on the night, as well as it has so far, then everyone should have a great time.