May 15 Jam Tracks

Ahoy shipmates and welcome aboard. Here I'd like to share some recordings from last week's open mic at Petie's Place, a local pub in the Valley, located on Reseda and Oxnard. 

I've played there over 40 times. Its become my de facto performance space. With a house drummer and bassist, it's very easy to just get up there and play with no strings attached. 

I did a two-song set that consisted of saxophonist Wayne Shorter's Footprints and Jimi Hendrix's' Hey Joe, tunes I've been playing for a while now. Been really working on my tone for the vocals. I've been practicing singing for a long time. I'm no Jack Bruce but I try. Petie's Place got a much better tube amp Line 6 full-stack amp so my tone has improved a lot. Enjoy! 

https://soundcloud.com/user-294063763/footprints-live-at-peties-1 
https://soundcloud.com/user-294063763/hey-joe 

Guitar, Vocals-Orlando Figueroa
Drums-Jim X
Bass-Art 
Harmonica-Dave
Tambourine-Ken 

Hey Joe, Musical Update

Hello ladies and gentlemen how has life been treating you all? Life has been great for me. I've been really refining my jazz guitar chops. Unfortunately the metal band I was in broke up, now its just me and the drummer still jamming together. Yesterday I jammed with a jazz drummer and we're going to keep getting together to work on standards. He said he didn't want to do a band with me but that he wants to continue jamming. His reasoning? Said I have to work more on my time, especially my swing feel. 

That was a bummer but I think I'm going to take this opportunity to play with a real jazz drummer and improve my chops, particularly my swing feel and time in general. The metronome has become a true friend now. 

I've improved a lot and my music mentor, a new music composer named Frank Abbananti (find his music https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=labor+studies+cd+baby) has been teaching me music from across the country, via email. He's taught me many things about chord voicings, music theory, and practicing to become better in general. We exchange email often and I think about everything he says as if we were in an academic setting. 

He sent me a new music (avant-garde) piece meant for me to perform on electric guitar with distortion. I played through it today a couple times and my dad said it sounds like Robin Trower if he did new music. Pretty great compliment from pops. He's going to send me more pieces to work on and perform and my goal is to record it for my Soundcloud. 

In addition, he said the next time I go to Chicago I can perform these pieces with him on a concert. 

Anyways, why am I sitting here when I should be practicing?! 

But before you go check out this cover of Hey Joe, the guitar solo was especially inspired. Dig the Jeff Beck reference at the end of the tune!

 https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/hey-joe 

Open Jam Tracks

Here's the tracks from last week's open jam at the local pub. I played two songs, Spirits of the Dead and Hey Joe. Spirits of the Dead is an original doomy death metalish sort of thing that I wrote on the first of October. This version here the vocals are a lot more cookie monster than I would've liked. I think I'll work on making the vocals coarse but not so 'cookie monster'. The cool thing is that this is probably the first time the song was performed as it was intended-screaming vocals and all. Not bad. I even threw down a solo in the song when there wasn't meant to be one. My drummer friend Martin's playing was splendid.

The other tune is Hey Joe, a Jimi Hendrix cover. On this one it was pretty rough. My guitar is sorely out of tune and we fucked up royally on the intro. But hey reader we made it through it. As you can hear even my guitar part goes off you can hear Martin is holding the beat steady on the drums. He has really improved his playing a lot. The longer the song goes the better it sounds, me thinks. The solo was well done by yours truly. Martin's fills at the end of the song are great.

Enjoy the tunes!

https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/spirits-of-the-dead-1
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/hey-joe

8/31 jam from Peties

So I got my last jam from Petie's Place recorded. This was more of a two guitar blues, jazz, and rock kind of night. The first tune we played was Stormy Monday but I totally improvised everything I played and went for a more round hollow body jazz sound, really jazzing up the changes. I think I did a really great job with the blues leads in this one. Then we did a simple rock riff instrumental that I created that's based off of Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin. Its a bit faster and has more metal style riffing in it than say pure Led Zep. Then for the last piece we played Hey Joe. I actually ended up doing the solo like how it actually goes in the recording, which was pretty cool because I usually prefer to improvise most of my solos. The singer on Stormy Monday and Hey Joe is this guy named Shane that I've been working with since these jams. Tonight we played Smoke on the Water together. He's a cool guy. Anyways, enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/user-294063763/stormy-monday-shane-vocals
https://soundcloud.com/user-294063763/rock-riff
https://soundcloud.com/user-294063763/hey-joe-shane-vocals