Last Week's Jam Tracks IV

Here's the tracks from last week's jam tracks from the local pub. 

The first track we played was Sunshine of Your Love (a staple of ours-me and martin my drummer friend), but this time it was performed with Jim, the house drummer at the open jam and an unknown bassist to me. The bass player is very good, as is Jim, which makes the guitar playing and singing very easy to do. I'm pretty proud of the solo I did here on Sunshine, a mix of straight up blues rock Hendrix-esque licks with a bit of shred. I like how when we ended the song I played the riff to Day Tripper retardando haha. That cowbell though! 

The next tune we played was Steve Vai's Bad Horsie. I still haven't gotten the hang of playing this so off the cuff and never practicing it with the musicians I play it with but I tried it again. Here it sounded pretty good with Jim's drumming and Bassist X's bass sound. I went for a super fast shred solo here. I really dig that melody and that metal riff. Steve Vai is a pretty big influence.

This week my drummer friend Martin couldn't make it so I played with the ace drummer Jim and this mysterious Bassist X dude with long hair and glasses, it turned out pretty well. My guitar sounded really great here, it sounds really in tune!  

https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/sunshine-of-your-love-cool-bass-and-drums
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/bad-horsie

Last Week's Jam Tracks III

Here are the live tracks from last week's open jam at Petie's Place, this bar I frequent a lot.

The first tune we played was Black Sabbath's Paranoid, pretty easy song right? Well, I did kind of mess up the song last week because I forgot to come in w/ some verses and instead just went into a guitar solo, then found my place back within the song. That's how you cover up a mistake folks, go into impromptu guitar solo mode! I'm still working on bringing more emotion into the singing.

Next, we played Sunshine of Your Love by the Cream. This has been like our swansong so to speak. Sometimes hearing my voice makes me cringe hard but when I hear the guitar playing I think again (lols). My vocals are definitely getting better but its still hard to get past that speaking voice to singing voice transition. Ken, the percussionist playing tambourine (and records everything for me, thank you) is really on point with his rhythm here. With him and my friend Martin on drums its like playing with two drummers. Martin takes care of fills and colour and Ken takes care of timing with precision.

The last tune we played was an improvised version of Steve Vai's Bad Horsie. I have a habit of doing impromptu versions of guitar instrumentals by shredders (check out this version of Buckethead's Soothsayer here). The melody from Bad Horsie is pretty strong here, a bluesy funky sort of melody that runs into some metal riffing. The way we did it this time I stopped playing and motioned Martin to do a drum solo. As you can hear it sounded pretty damn good. My friend Martin is really coming into his own as a rock and roll drummer. At the end I did some tapping and held a note for what seemed like eons while Martin played some crazy rolls. That's pretty cool.

Here are all the tracks, enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/paranoid-forget-the-verse-ha
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/sunshine-of-your-love-latest-version
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/steve-vai-bad-horsie-impromtu-jam-version