How many of you dep/stand in for bands?

koneguitarist

I used to a lot but have been cutting right back due to time constraints etc.

But recently agreed to stand in on the 14th for a soul funk band who I don't know, but bassist is someone I taught a few years ago. 

So technically I am doing him a favour, but now the set list has dropped in my lap, I feel I may have bitten off more than I can chew this time. 

Luckily I am on guitar so majority of stuff is easier than if I was on bass, but there is still some songs, where the solos are quite difficult to say the least for someone who mainly plays in a major scale!

Stuff like Hot Stuff by Donna Summer and Superstition by Stevie Wonder is outside of my country with a bit of Chuck Berry limited licks!

No Rehearsel, just turn up and meet band on the night! Should be ...........interesting to say the least!

spacecadet

It's something I have been doing a lot more of. Currently standing in long term for a guy who has buggered off on tour with a pretty high profile singer. No pressure on me then!

Something I have found with any of the dep work I have been doing is that if you bring your own personality to the song, it tends to come off as much more interesting than doing something note by note. OK, yes if you were playing a song the guitar part be it lead or rhythm was an integral part of then you have to learn it. I'll give you an example. One band I have done some work for is mainly funk orientated. I got thrown Carwash halfway through the set. I pretty much blagged my way through it half remembering the guitar slide funky part. The singer then turns to me and shouts solo! A second or so fumbling around remembering what key I was in, hitting a drive pedal and I went into what can only be described as a screaming cock rock fest of a guitar break. Totally inappropriate but everyone from the band as well as the punters lapped it up. So much so, the singer dragged it out for ages.

I have now become quite well known on the circuit and have a pretty busy diary for the rest of the year. The moral of the story is do the important/ memorable bits right. The rest you can make up and just have fun with.

Travisthedog

Superstition is piece of piss Taff - we do it so it can't that hard!!

Just add a but of dirt

digitalscream

Travisthedog said:

Superstition is piece of piss Taff - we do it so it can't that hard!!

Just add a but of dirt

We're doing it like this...

bigjon

I'm doing 2 dep gigs - my first for quite a while - this weekend, subbing for the guitarist for the last 45 years (!) who is ill. I got a list of 45 song titles and keys 3 days before the rehearsal, spent 6 hours with YouTube and a capo mugging them up, kicked off the first song and only then realised they meant Let's dance by Chris Montez not Chris Rea! Went fine after that, though, and I'm really looking forward to this weekend - it's like playing my parents' record collection!

spacecadet

digitalscream said:

Travisthedog said:

Superstition is piece of piss Taff - we do it so it can't that hard!!

Just add a but of dirt

We're doing it like this...

Consider that stolen!

bigjon

The other dep this band are using is Tim Slater, who used to write for Guitarist back in the day I believe

DannyP

I dep loads on the Beatles tribute circuit. We all know each other, dep for each other and gossip about each other!

It's universally accepted that a dep gets £200 for a gig (travel expenses negotiable) which is a shade more than most of us get for standard gigs, so we're all happy to do it.

fretfinder

I don't dep but since our bass player sadly popped his clogs a couple of years ago we've just used stand-ins and now have three guys we use and it's quite fun really, playing with different folks from time to time. (And it's only bass, I mean how hard can it be?!)

axisus

I'm in awe of anyone who can even contemplate doing it. I just never bothered to learn covers/songs so no chance in hell, but I can't imagine ever having the confidence to do it either. My repertoire stands at two songs! (Money and Sylvia) 

Hat's off to the lot of you.

RocknRollDave

We have used a fair few deps over the years, and we've never had anyone we really felt let us down. There are some quality musicians around...especially for paying gigs.

I sort of dep for a three-piece..I say "sort of" cos I have done a fair few gigs with them now, and a lot of the repertoire overlaps ours (also a wedding band), plus it's with a bassist/ singer I have known for over 20 years, so it's not like going in cold with a bunch of strangers.

In terms of learning songs, you'd be surprised how straightforward most songs are - or at least most songs that you are likely to play in a covers set. There will, of course, be songs that are more tricky than others to play like the record, but, as has been said on these boards before many a time, the idea of having to play songs just like the record is a red herring and once you shake off that notion, the job is considerably less stressful.

ESBlonde

When I were a lad, (puts on slippers and lights up pipe) I played in commercial/covers bands and we would learn 2 or 3 new songs a week from cassette recordings off the Sunday charts on AM radio. After a while you got good at that and learned to adapt some material to your playing style as well as develop more playing styles. I spent about 10 years doing lots of dep work, a lot of it really last minuet including scratch bands put together to do single gigs because it was there.
I spent about 2 years as Dep guitarist in an electric folk band! longer than any of there regular guitarists as is goes.
These days I don't gig much but do still fill in for friends now and again, I think the scare factor adds something which I don't appreciate in the real world, but on stage it just seems alright.

Funk is my thing @Koneguitarist, it's a shame you're so far away else I'd pop down and have a bash with you.

monquixote

I do a bit of depping now and again. 

It's a good laugh and not too hard provided the band stick to the album keys and arrangements. 

mike257

Doing one on Saturday, first gig on bass (my instrument of choice) in ages.  I depped on guitar for the same band earlier this year, got the call at three hours notice as the regular guy was stuck on a broken down train at the wrong end of the country.  Was an interesting evening, just about pulled it off!

Kebabkid

I dep on guitar in 2 bands and just got made permanent in the 3rd band I was depping for, albeit on bass. I don't mind it as they're all very different, good musicians and nice people and variety is the spice of life and all that malarkey. However, there's nothing like being a permanent member in a band and feeling that sense that you truly belong to something with regular rehearsals and the social side.

My only bit of advice for depping is make a note of the songs you've learned i.e.keep your cheat sheets/tab etc in a folder as you'll never know when you'll need them again and let's face it, you've gone to the trouble of learning the stuff.

drwiddly

I used to do quite a lot. Got asked to dep for a function band a few years back with a weeks notice and a set with about 50 songs of which I knew about 6! Cheat sheets are your friend!

The gig went great and we had a good laugh. Depped for them and another couple of bands many times since then. Always seems like you're flying by the seat of your pants but that makes it more fun somehow.

RocknRollDave

monquixote said:

I do a bit of depping now and again. 

It's a good laugh and not too hard provided the band stick to the album keys and arrangements. 

Daft thing is, when I dep for this other band it tends to be fine on the night but it's when I go back to my regular band that I start messing things up - I concentrate so hard as a dep to play songs in a different key to what I am used to, that when I go back to playing them how I have week-in week-out for months, years even..I forget what key I'm supposed to be in and am all over the shop.

Or, can we call it "jazz-style modulation"...?

RocknRollDave

Kebabkid said:

My only bit of advice for depping is make a note of the songs you've learned i.e.keep your cheat sheets/tab etc in a folder as you'll never know when you'll need them again and let's face it, you've gone to the trouble of learning the stuff.

This is very sound advice. I recently started laminating my chord sheets, which looks a bit w*nky and geeky but the amount of times I've had a song dropped on me where it was a case of "Yeah, you know this one! We played it in 2008 at that hotel in Bristol, remember...?" and gone to my folder to find a tatty, illegible scrap of paper where a chord sheet used to be, I learned to finally start taking care of the preciouses.

EDIT
Oh and another thought: I used to be very nervous about the idea of playing a song live if we hadn't rehearsed it over and over until we were super sure of it before unleashing it on an unsuspecting crowd...but playing so many weddings has put paid to that.
What are we going to do, have a rehearsal every week just to learn each first dance song? Or just do our homework and trust ourselves that we can navigate a safe course to the end of the song?
It's surprisingly easy to play a song unrehearsed so long as you have agreed a key, discussed intros/ endings and any other potentially contentious parts (eg "Are we really doing three choruses at the end like the record, or shall we knock it off after two?")
 

Danny1969

I've actually gone to London with a friend and 2 session guys and pretended to be a completely different band for one wedding gig, so the real band who weren't there could play the wedding of someone very famous. We had one rehearsal for that but it went ok

I get by on learning intervals, I'm not interested in chord sheets so much as you might not know what key your in until the gig so you think of a song like this. Root chord or riff, up a 4th etc so I would think of Brown Eyed girl as 

Intro : Major double stops starting on root and major 3rd

Verse : Root chord, 4th, root, 5th etc

Pre chorus  : hang on 5th

Chorus Root, 4th, root, 5th

Some stuff can be tricky to move the key and still sound right if it needs open strings like Mr Brightside but in general you can remember the intervals and play from them. Eventually you can transcribe the chord sequence of a song quite easily on the fly without picking up a guitar if the sequence isn't too hectic or jazz flavoured. 

@koneguitarist

You might have an advantage with superstition as the main riff sounds great if you chickin pick it

 

koneguitarist

Thanks for the replies and the encouragement, chicken picking soul, sounds cool!

paisleysoul

It's something i'd like to do more, but I need to get my scales up to scratch. I dep for an indie songwriter here in Medway on bass and guitar when needed, and thats all nice chords with occasional riffs, but id love to do some more funky blues stuff. Ear to the ground and all that.