So last year my friends and I finally got together and had a group practice session for our nascent band. We’ve scheduled a second session in a couple of weeks’ time and we’re learning our parts for our second song (I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers).

So at lunch today we were discussing various related things, like what name we should call our band, and what other songs we should stick on our list of easy songs to learn while we’re starting out. And we started to realise that all of our musical tastes have very little overlap. There were three of us there (out of five) with iPhones/iPads chock full of music, and we could not find even one song that all three of us had on our devices.

One of us would call out something like “The Beatles!” and another would go, “Yes, of course!” and the third would go, “I don’t have any Beatles”. And then someone said “R.E.M.” and one would say “Yes!” and the third would say “no”. And so on. Billy Joel. Beethoven. U2. Blur. Muse. Enya. Mozart. Sinatra. Everything we tried, at most two of us had.

And then there were the other two guys in the room, one who is mainly into prog rock, which none of the rest of us are, and the other… well, he listed some of his favourite artists, which included Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Chopin, Scriabin, and some Polish composer I’ve never heard of. This guy took eclectic, cut the ends off, threw away the middle, and glued the two ends together. Seriously.

So in trying to come up with a list of more songs we could start learning, everything that someone suggested, most of the others had never heard of. We were amazed by the fact that we’ve all been friends for years, yet there seems to be virtually no overlap at all between any of our musical tastes. And we’re trying to form a band.

The good thing is that we bring a huge variety of enormously different music into this project, and we will all be expanding our musical knowledge.

Tonight my drum teacher started teaching me about dynamics. Accented notes, ghost notes, and so on. We spent some time on technique for the various different volume levels, practising to make sure there was an obvious differentiation in loudness when I played the different types of notes. He’s been running me through a program which he’s developing for his second book, and testing out the new material on me to make sure it’s not too advanced for someone at my level. He said this was the stuff he was most worried about, as it’s tricky to learn for the first time.

I did find it a bit tricky, but I think with a week to practise before my next lesson I might manage this material. The shown bars are a groove from James Brown’s Cold Sweat. This is the sort of level I’m at now. I can look at this music and have a good attempt at playing it. Not very well, but it’s not impossible and I can probably master it given a week of practice.