I'm in a band and the drummer is great vocals also fine but the 2 guitarist, friends of mine, althought reasonably skilled have no clue about playing in a band. The bass (me) and the drummer hit it of easy enough and have no problem complementing eachother. I feel that the drummer and me have a way higher skill level than the guitarists.
yeah okay there playing some hendrix and giving good solo's but they HAVE NO IDEA about playing together. If i say let's play a simple blues they have no clue. And they are not bad guitarist they play a lot of things very good but they seem not to have any ablity to improvise. I told them that they need to listen and they could try to play that Bob marley song
with a up stroke instead of giving the guitar an oasis style shakedown.
They do not seem to figure it out by them selves that they could try to simply fit in instead of playing with their nose on the fretboard and introvertedly play out of tune. I could use some advice on this.

Any comments welcome.

I do have some advice, but you might not like it:

Fire them.

I'm actually not kidding. The sort of problems that you describe are, of course, very common, but there's nothing you can say or do that will make other players grow up instantly and actually be useful, contributing members of the band. By firing them, you rid yourself of a frustrating nuisance -- additionally, there's the slight possibility that one of the fired guitarists may start asking you or himself what the problem was, and what he can do to get back in. If the questions are serious, you tell him the answer or he figures it out for himself, and then maybe he'll get it together.

I've been fired from a gig or two, and I always ask why when it's possible to do so -- you'll always learn something from the answer, even if what you learn is that you probably shouldn't have taken the gig in the first place. Sometimes I've gotten the gig back, and all parties were more satisfied the second time around.

If you're all best friends or you live in a tiny town, you have my sympathy, but no further advice.

I'm afraid I have to agree with the previous advice: fire 'em.

It probably won't get any better and there are a lot of good guitarists out there with a good attitude and an ability to cooperate. It's not your responsibility to help these losers get there act together.

If these are good friends, I'm sorry. You'll still probably have to fire them. You may want to be gentle about it if you'd like to maintain the friendship, but don't hold out too much hope.

IME, this is the worst sort of situation to be in as a band. You will be required to fire a band member sometimes and if you ever get to where you enjoy it you probably shouldn't be in a band yourself.


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Michael Riehle
Bass Player/Band Leader
fivespeed