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Band Guide

4. HOW TO REHEARSE

Where and When?

Where? Wherever you can. It's often difficult to find a rehearsal room, especially if your music leans toward loud guitars and thudding drums. Parents and neighbors may balk at the noise, so you have to be creative—and willing to give something in return. Volunteer the band for garage cleanup duty in exchange for two weeks worth of practices. And check with any neighbors in advance for opportune times.

When? It depends on the band members' schedules. At a minimum, we suggest one two-hour session a week—the better you want to be, the more you should rehearse. Nighttime rehearsals are often the most convenient for everybody, but they're not required. Try the morning, before school or work. Or two or three lunch hours per week.

The single hardest thing about planning rehearsals is setting up the schedule. Invariably, the singer's best day is the bassist's worst day. But once you set up the schedule, stick to it. (If a change becomes necessary, make it together, then stick to that.) If it's every Wednesday at 8 P.M., don't show up at 7:30 or 8:20. Be on time. Nothing's worse than keeping an eager band waiting.

The perfect basement—or garage, bedroom, or backyard—is one the owners will let you use for free. Beyond that, it should have plenty of space for each band member, and enough electrical outlets to accommodate many amps.

Often it's not so much a matter of finding the perfect rehearsal room as creating one. If you're in an apartment building, and your rehearsal time happens to be smack in the middle of EastEnders or the FA Cup final, be sensitive to neighbors' needs. Maybe you can muffle the drums by putting towels over them, or use soft mallets instead of sticks. Maybe everybody can rehearse with headphones. Or instead of using your gigantic Marshall Stack amplifier, plug your guitars into a tiny practice amp. Sometimes the solution is as simple as moving to another room.

Communication, as always, is crucial. Here's a conciliatory thing you can tell the neighbors: "Every Wednesday night from 7 to 9 it may be a little noisy in here. If it's too noisy, just let us know and we'll adjust." Better yet, work with them to find an opportune time. Nobody wants to squander useful rehearsal time and energy on cat-fights with unsympathetic neighbors.

Whatever rehearsal space you use, make sure it's properly ventilated. If there's a propane heater, don't hang blankets or egg crates or other flammable soundproofing unless you're sure the heater functions properly. Have a fire extinguisher on hand, and know how to use it. And remember all the stuff your parents told you about garage safety: Don't start the car with the door closed and so forth.

About renting: Early in your band's career, the cost of rehearsal space—from £5 an hour in a cheap warehouse to £100 an hour for a luxurious room with a PA system—will probably be prohibitive. But if you have that kind of money, and all your free-basement leads have fizzled, check the local paper. Often, classified ads will list rental spaces. And if you live in a big city, try the musician's union, which has experience linking bands with rehearsal spots.

Short of that, again, be creative. Maybe the local high school music teacher will let you use the facilities during an off period of the school day. Try the youth center or even the local church.

How?

Improvisation is fun, and you might be the kind of band that wants to agree on a musical key and solo, solo, solo. (Some big-time bands, including the String Cheese Incident and Phish, have made entire careers of this.) But at a certain point somebody—maybe you—will inevitably say, "How about if we learn some songs?" In some bands, the collective answer might be: "Nah!" In others, the musicians may be just as bored as you are and crave structure.

The hard part is agreeing on what kind of structure, To start playing basic rock, blues, folk, and pop songs, start with the lyrics to the songs—and perhaps the chord changes. (These days, almost every popular song is fully transcribed on the Internet; use the Google search engine or broad-ranging websites such as lyrics.com.)

When using preprinted lyrics and chord transcriptions, it's not necessary to have music-reading ability. (Although sometimes it helps.) If everybody in the band knows three or four particular chords, you'll have an endless repertoire, from rock classics like The Kingsmen's "Louie, Louie" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to country and blues standards like Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" and Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home, Chicago."

Band communication is crucial. If one guy insists on Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff" and another can't live without playing "Kum Ba Ya" on stage at least once in his lifetime, you'll have to compromise. Indulge each person with a favorite until, after many rehearsals, the band becomes good at certain songs and not so good at others. (This will become obvious.) At that point, reshuffle.

In Tune

"Why doesn't it sound right?" is the most frustrating question a rehearsing band can ask. Especially if the question comes up after every song, for hours at a time. Usually the answer is simple: "Because somebody is way out of tune." Tuning takes just a few minutes—less time with experience—but can prevent hours of irritation.

An electronic tuner costs as little as £10 (or as much as £100) and is a worthwhile investment. In the old days, guitarists used tuning forks and plucked individual strings until their ears told them they were on target. Today, a tuner smaller than a cell phone will lead you to the right pitch using LED lights. Tuners are simple to figure out, and you can even turn off the amp and tune in silence, using your eyes rather than your ears.

Before you start rehearsal, take time to tune up. And if you play piano or drums, be patient and avoid the distracting urge to fiddle around while the guitarists tune up.

It sounds so simple: Decide on a musical key and have everybody play in that key. But…what if the guitarist prefers E and the pianist can only play in C and F? What if everybody enjoys B-flat, but you insist on playing Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman," which, according to your sheet music, is written in A?

The basic rule is to let the singer pick the key. Otherwise, he or she will have to strain and the song will sound terrible. Guitarists and pianists can always learn new chords, but inexperienced singers comfortable in C will have a hard time switching to D-flat on short notice.

If the band insists on playing a more complicated song, tricky chords and all, you may want to table it until the members have had a chance for individual home practice. Learning a new song at group rehearsal is valuable, but learning how to play a new chord tends to be a one-person activity—and will likely frustrate the rest of the group. Start with songs you all can play, and grow from there. Guitar tabs can help all the musicians, not just guitarists, figure out what chords to play when.

Structure

A song is like a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Bands, unlike individual writers, have to agree on how to approach each of these segments. In most bands, the drummer begins a song—by clicking sticks together in the agreed-upon 1, 2, 3, 4 tempo. Often, however, the guitarist will end the song by lifting up the guitar neck to get everybody's attention, and then dropping it down for "cut!"

Then again, in some bands, the singer or accepted bandleader will be the point person for these details. Either way, you'll have to accept the decision—unilaterally ending a particular song yourself, even if you think it has dragged on long enough, is likely to create tension in the band.

These details, of course, must be frequently rehearsed for smooth execution.

Eventually, after slogging through these decisions and rehearsal repetitions, you'll start to become more comfortable with each other. Experienced bands begin to communicate with a sort of telepathy, using eye contact and other unspoken cues to coordinate instinctively. If you're in the mood for a band field trip, try to catch a veteran band in concert—watching Pearl Jam or The Rolling Stones communicate nonverbally is a rich learning experience. You can pick up the same knowledge—although it won't be nearly as fun—by watching concert DVDs.

Mixing

Although every musician uses the same palette of notes, keys, and chords, different musical instruments speak different languages. Inexperienced keyboardists hate to use too many black keys, while inexperienced guitarists are uncomfortable stretching their fingers from one difficult chord to the next. And it's often hard for a guitarist to recognize what a keyboardist is playing, and vice versa.

Communication, as always, overcomes these concerns. It may take a minute in practice for a pianist to transpose a song he knows in C to a song that better fits the singer and guitarist in B. (Transposing means converting a set of chords from one key to another; many electronic pianos will do this with the push of a button. Otherwise, the musician will simply have to write down the new set of chords.)

It can't hurt for musicians to learn other instruments. A drummer who knows a little guitar will better understand certain musical cues—if the rhythm accelerates after a key change, for example, the drummer will more quickly adapt to what's going on. Similarly, there's nothing more frustrating for a pianist than a guitarist who says, "Just watch my fingers and do what I do." Basic guitar lessons can help. But that's not a necessity; communication is.

The regular group rehearsal shouldn't be your band's only rehearsal. Each musician should plan to spend several hours at home learning new parts and smoothing out kinks. And the bassist and drummer may want to schedule separate "rhythm-section rehearsals" to lock down the groove. What will they do? Play the songs. It'll only make things better when the guitar player arrives for regular rehearsal. Similarly, "vocal-only rehearsals" are effective for bands that emphasize group harmonies.

Rhythm

Rhythm, or tempo, is as easy as counting and feeling the beat of the music. Your drummer will certainly want to learn about time signatures—rock-and-country-time 4/4 or waltz-time 3/4, for example, which fundamentally define a song's rhythm. But the rest of the band will have to align itself to the drummer's speed and avoid dragging or rushing.

If everybody counts to four at the same speed, your band has itself a rhythm. If this seems impossible, you may want to invest in a metronome, a small automatic musical counting device, but as mentioned earlier, this can lead to restrictions and frustrations. A better plan might be to let the drummer play the groove alone for a bit while the rest of the band counts silently.

Most songs, by acts ranging from Frank Sinatra to Dashboard Confessional, are built on these basic elements:

The verse, as with a verse in a poem, is where you lay out your lyrics and essentially tell the song's story.

The bridge is exactly what the name implies—the link between the verse and the chorus.

The chorus is a more repetitive summary of the verses, or if you will, the "sing-along portion" of the song. It often contains the hook.

These elements won't appear in every song—sometimes you'll encounter a classical, jazz, hip-hop, or just plain experimental piece that ignores such structure altogether. (Nirvana, to name one popular rock band, actively mocked this structure—one of the band's early 1990s tunes was called "Verse Chorus Verse." The song was surprisingly traditional.)

The hook is whatever makes a song stand out and appeal to people. It may be a melody, like a bluegrass band singing "you are my sunshine, my only sunshine." Or it may be a catchy guitar riff, like AC/DC going deedle deedle deedle dee at the end of every verse in "Back in Black." Hit songs, especially those on the radio, almost always have prominent, repetitive hooks.

By playing other people's songs, you'll get a feel for traditional verse-chorus-verse structures—and maybe get some ideas on how to structure your own material later on.

Arrangement

Arrangements are basically what you do with the verses, choruses, and bridges. They're the blueprint of your song, and once the band decides how to put one together, everybody must stick to the plan. Unless you're playing experimental, purposely dissonant jazz, the pianist can't decide to take an impromptu break while the guitarist is in the middle of a solo, or it will throw everyone off.

The Role of the Leader

Rehearsals may be going pretty well—you've found a place to set up, you can play a few songs all the way through without mistakes, and the jams are sounding tighter and tighter. So why not do it like this forever? Because at some point, to progress creatively or even financially, you'll have to become more sophisticated.

The first step in this direction is choosing a leader. Certainly it's possible to function, as a group, without a leader. But then who settles the arguments? Who picks, or writes, the songs? Who decides which gigs to play?

Choosing is perhaps too strong a word. Somebody in the band will probably emerge without discussion as the leader. You'll recognize that person when he or she starts making assertions, like, "I think we should play this song" or "What if we started trying to play in public?" or "Here, I've written a few of my own lyrics for us to try." There is nothing inherently wrong with this; if one person wants to assume the responsibility and extra workload that comes with being the leader, why not give that person a shot?

If you're a competitive person, or if you just can't stand following orders, a certain amount of resentment toward the leader is natural. But give the new leader a chance. Maybe the decisions will be pretty good, and maybe vision is just what the band needs. If the would-be leader becomes too controlling or manipulative, you can deal with that later through communication and compromise. Or, yes, firing.

Some bands are purely democratic, which means everything that happens goes up for a vote. Feel free to try this approach. Everything—where to park the van outside the gig, who collects the money from the event organizer, who writes the thank you note to the neighbors for not complaining about the loud rehearsals—goes up for a vote. As you can imagine, this process can be quite cumbersome.

There's a certain amount of democracy to every band. Every member should be involved in important financial decisions (like whether to open a band bank account or hire a manager), for instance. But it's easiest for one person to set a direction, and too much input can confuse or cloud the issues. Endless debate kills any band quickly.

More often than not, the leadership role just sticks to somebody like a magnet. If you find the rest of the band coming to you with questions, whether they're musical or business matters, you might be the leader. If you wind up doing little things nobody else does, like buying supplies for rehearsal, or proposing a rhythm-section rehearsal, you might be the leader. If that's the case, accept the role. You can make decisions, but don't be mean. Benevolent dictators are the most effective dictators.

You're in a band, a unit, a group, a marriage, so don't let little things eat at your ego. If it's your job to play a little guitar bit between two verses of a song, do that. Don't act like you're the talent who's slumming until something better comes along.

Have we mentioned communication yet? The best way to figure out your role, if it's confusing, is to ask. As the keyboardist, maybe you aren't sure whether to augment the bassist by playing along with your left hand. Ask the bassist or the leader. Bring issues out in the open—during calm moments, rather than stressful ones—and discuss them until you're satisfied. This is a key component of successful marriages.

In a rehearsal situation, defer to the leader. But if anybody feels he or she needs to rehearse a part again, speak up. Just pay attention to the structure of the rehearsal. Deal with a particular song while you're working on it. If you've long since moved on to the fourth song, it'll only frustrate everybody if you return to the second.

"Hey, I've got to learn this one a little better—can we take it up again next week?" is an appropriate thing to suggest. That way, you don't have to muddle through several frustrating versions of a song. Of course, if you're playing that song at a gig the following night, it behooves you to practice until you get it right.

Taping

It's essential, if the band wants to improve, to tape a rehearsal and require each member to sit down and listen. Self-critique sessions are invaluable, but only if everybody remains constructive. Don't make these criticism sessions personal.

Certainly each band member can borrow the playback tape and listen with more scrutiny during personal time. But beware of tampering with fragile group dynamics. If one musician takes the tape home and returns to say the bass playing isn't in time, and the defensive bass player says, "prove it," you're in danger of upheaval. Individual listening can help correct unrecognized problems, but it should supplement the group critique sessions, not replace them.