Playing for a cover band, is it worth it?
My Approach
I’ve never been one of those musicians who learns every song they’ve ever liked and nailed down all the standard tunes people ask you to play once you say, “yeah, I play guitar!” It’s not that I have anything against the idea of it. Plenty of people judge musicians or bands for doing covers while at the same time clicking on that new YouTube video of a band playing a cover of a popular song. Conveniently, they hardly ever seem to click on the same band playing an original, if that band has any. I’m not one of those people. Ok, maybe I don’t always check out a band’s original tunes. You caught me.
Personally, I think it’s very difficult to learn someone else’s song well enough to do it justice. It’s even harder to make a cover sound original and good. And if you’ve ever learned a solo and really dug into it, you quickly found that emulating the feel and phrasing of another player is extremely tricky. I’d say that most of us get by playing an approximation of a great performance. Then we can just hope no one in the audience is canny enough to recognize our shortcomings. Well, that’s how I’ve often felt.
Here’s a quick demonstration for your entertainment:
Respect for the innovators
Respect for any music that has stayed with us through the generations is well-deserved and should be given. And, if a song has made an impact on a wide audience, chances are there is something valuable you can learn from it.
- What makes that rhythm part sooo groovy?
- Very few guitar solos are iconic, so why are some?
- A great melody is still a great melody decades later, but what makes it great? Can we make equally great melodies by examing those that came before?
Those are just a few examples of great questions to ask, but the list is truly endless. What we can learn from a great song is only limited by our own imagination. I’ve certainly gone back to a track I know well after a few years and suddenly noticed details I’d been missing forever. Was that vocal double really there this whole time? I guess so. What about that cool guitar part panned hard right and mixed to the point of being more a feeling than a sound? Yeah, sure it was. These are the kinds of things we can extract and experiment with ourselves. At the very least, we can seem like snobbish audiophiles and parade our superiority around in company. On second thought, that could just be a great way to get everyone to hate you.
Reading isn’t writing
No great author has ever become great simply from reading a library of books. In fact, an apprentice writer who knows 10 books inside out and upside down and tried to apply via emulation what they learned will be far more advanced than one who has read 200 books. Obviously I’m making that comparison up, but the point holds. If you learn 10 songs deeply, learn to play them, learn to utilize the ideas found in them, then you will find you are suddenly much advanced from where you started. I mean, how much did you really improve after passively listening to your favorite albums? They sure are a great source of inspiration and motivation, though.
I have a friend who is terrified of sounding like the singers he likes best and so is afraid to emulate them for practice.
First, why would you not want to sound like your favorite singers? I’d be thrilled to be able to sound exactly like my favorite musicians and bands. The truth is that I never will. My friend never will either. There are far too many variables that go into making an instrument, whether voice or otherwise, sound the way it does to ever get closer than sounding like you’re in the same ballpark.
Second, these recordings we so love are of the masters of their craft. We can only win by copying them, stealing from them outright even. Don’t plagiarize, I do not endorse that. Well, plagiarize a little. Every guitarist at some point will play the standard blues licks during a solo. And why not? They sound great!
This is a good example of a rockin’ blues lick used in the song “Shine” by Collective Soul:
And the point?
Just play music! Yes, playing for a cover band is totally worth it even if you’re the most virtuoso shredder in the world. Never lose sight that every opportunity is a chance to learn something valuable if you will only see it that way. Many times you’ll even find yourself playing styles you don’t ever even dabble in. You might just find something unexpected in the music you don’t know.