Our First Practice As The New Band example essay topic

Well, it all started soph more year of high school. My friends and I were always into rock music but around that time we really started getting into punk rock, hardcore, and indie rock. Bands like Bad Religion, 7 Seconds, The Descendants, Bad Brains, and Shutdown influenced the attitude we had toward music, as well as what we chose to listen to. One day while sitting around the lunch table with my friends Chris, Joe and Andrew, we started discussing how cool it would be to play in a band.

Coincidentally Andrew, Joe and myself all played the guitar, and Chris had a knack for poetry and a desert singing voice. We decided to start a band. Once we started talking about it, we realized that it was not possible to have three guitar players in a band, so Joe volunteered to take up bass. Thus we almost had a complete line up.

As of then, the lineup consisted of Chris on vocals, Me on guitar, Andrew on Guitar, and Joe on bass. We needed a drummer, but didn't know anyone who played drums besides our friend Scott who was already in a band. We finally talked him into it and the lineup was complete. We had our first practice in October of 1999. It was not successful. We had crappy equiptment, no skills, and we knew absolutely nothing about writing music.

We got into a big fight, and decided to stop until the next day. The next day we got together and made some slight progress. Although we sounded horrible, we were having fun. We needed a name. We decided to call ourselves "Social Discontent" because the majority of the lyrics Chris was writing at the time were semi political and aimed to express his unhappiness with the performance of society.

Our first and only song was entitled "The Law". It was not good. We were not good. Actually we were horrible. But just the fact that we were in a band and had a song made us happy. After a few more practices, Andrew was starting to disagree with the rest of the band on various topics.

Social Discontent started to fall apart. Andrew was a good friend, and we did not want to kick him out of the band, so instead of doing that, we just all quit the band, and started a new band without him. It consisted of the exact same members of Social Discontent, minus Andrew. Witch meant I was the only guitarist. After our first practice as the new band (witch was another disaster), Scott told us that due to his busy sched ual, he could not be in two bands any longer, and since he was in the other one first, he was gonna stick with them. We understood, and Scott left the band.

We now needed a drummer... again. Lucky for us, we had a friend by the name of Josh who indeed wanted to play the drums for us! There was only one problem. He had never played before in his life. But he told us he could borrow a drum set form his couse n and teach himself, so we said ok.

The line up was then: Chris on vocals, Me on guitar, Joe on bass, and josh on drums. To our surprise, Josh could actually keep a beat, which was good enough for us. Being 14 and 15 at the time, we did not care what we sounded like, we were just having fun. We decided to call our selves "The Reform" because we believed that this new band and this new lineup was a change for the better. We wrote our first four songs in about 3 months. "Never Give Up", "Revolution", Open Mind", and "Chain of command" were our masterpieces. we were slowly getting an idea of what it is to write music, and were were all getting better at our instruments as well.

It was a truly great feeling. After being a band for about 4 months, Joe was starting to miss practices. He was having trouble in school and couldn't do it anymore. After along talk, Joe decided to leave the band. We were out a bassist for the first time. Then I remembered something!

By best friend and long time friend of everyone else in the band, Leon, played bass and was actually good! The next day in school I asked him if he wanted to join "The Reform", and he gladly excepted with open arms. It was great. We began practicing with him and everything just seemed to click. After our first show, that summer, we thought it would be a good idea to record a demo. We now had about seven songs and we were getting pretty tight.

We managed to scrounge up about one thousand dollars between the four of us and recorded our six song demo at runaway studios in Port Washington. I listen to it now, and I am not impressed. We " ve come a long way since then, but at the time we were happier than we'd ever been. We sold the demo for three dollars at our shows. And people actually bought them. And people started coming to see us.

It was unreal. We could not believe that people actually liked us. We kept playing shows, and getting booked, and selling demo's, and people started learning the words to our songs and singing along when we would play live. We decided it was time for a website. I took some web design classes in high school so I knew what to do. I got us a domain name and built a great site.

The address is web We have music that you can download from the site for free, pictures, news, show details and more. After a while we decided it was about time to recruit a second guitarist to add more power to our sound. In comes Jordan. A long time friend and very talented and experienced guitarist with a true love for music. He fits right in. About a year later we enter the studio once more to record our first full length album entitled "Stand In Line".

This time our music is complex, tight, and energetic. Weve come a long way. I think about it now, and I say to myself "this is what I want to do with my life". We " ve progressed a tremendous amount since we first started. We " ve been a band for almost four years now.

We are experienced, we have a record out, we have a descent fan base because we play shows almost every weekend and we are planning our first tour of the east coast in the summer. Its amazing how 5 little kids screaming their heads off in a basement can change everything about their future forever. And I can honestly say, It was all worth it.