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I don't know what your personal priorities and motivations are. But, mine include always looking to improve my skills and musical sensibility, which I can do even playing music, or in a band, that I'm not that happy with. Of course, I'd rather play my preferred genre's of music with players I really want to play with. Absent those options, I'll play for the benefit of my personal priorities.
True! But I haven’t stopped reading your posts, so how do you explain that?
I retired right before covid and my wife and i moved for first time in 30yrs to a nicer place. I had a studio built out back and practiced my ass off during shut down. In the last six yrs, ive played with some of the best musicians, diverse music i ever have. I was reluctant to play clubs again but i do and enjoy because of the caliber of persons/musicians im playing with. While i was making a living playing country, i was studying everything else.
I'm not a believer and I used to be able to swallow that stuff. But I'm having a much more difficult time lately. I don't mind the message actually, but some of the songs are banal. I'd be better off playing tambourine on the classics than some of the new stuff.
I get that! I was once in a band with one member who operated along those same lines. The guy was the singer and couldn't seem to figure out his mic stand, so that he'd often bump the thing, the mic would fall to the floor, and then by the time that he would put it back together, a 2 or 4 bar intro would become an 8 bar thing and really sap the momentum of the music. He played a digital sampler, with some clips of stuff like old movie dialog, which was cool in theory, but the guy would mix up samples and pretty constantly play the wrong samples at the wrong time, and if not that he would have trouble getting the thing to work at all. I won't even get into his playing on the trumpet and French horn, instruments that he claimed he was first chair on in high school, but could almost never play the simple lines in our songs without hitting a few notes that were WAY out of key. It was too bad because he and the guitarist, who was an almost equally shaky player, wrote some tunes that I thought had some real potential, it's just that they never seemed to come out nearly as great as I felt they should have.
Its called being a professional. I don't like a lot of things I have had to play but thats just part of it unless are the band leader. Even then its rare as you need to play what the audience wants to here if you want to succeed
Yeah, that's a pretty silly, useless attitude. The church could just as easily consider part of their mission to give back to the community monetarily, so if they are offering some kind of service, that it's important for them to be fairly compensated. I helped start and was on the board of a local music non-profit until recently and one of the missions of that thing is to actually employ folks in the community. There are certainly volunteers involved, but the key posts tend to be paid. If you claim to be doing something for the community, it seems like part of that could be to put money into folks' pockets in return for doing work for the organization.
