Now that I’m finally settling down into our career, I at last have time to play music on the weekends with our friends.
- I play guitars and a little bit of keyboards, but the five of us all cover the many bases to form a traditional band with drums, bass, guitar, keys, and saxophone.
The bassist and lead keyboardist are both vocalists, but our bass player is usually the lead while the latter sings backup. Back before the pandemic every one of us would rent the practice room at our local Guitar Center, but these were closed nationwide when lockdown orders went into effect. I kept calling them throughout the pandemic to see if there was an ETA on when they would open again, but I’m still getting conflicting information whenever I call the local store or contractor headquarters. The people I was with and I had to find a different location in which to practice as a band, and this wasn’t easy. At first every one of us tried to pitch in currency to play at a traditional practice studio, but this proved to be way too costly for our budget. That’s when every one of us agreed to throw in the currency needed to rent a small space in a warehouse building. Unblessedly, the lack of air conditioning was a hard impasse at first. The people I was with and I almost threw in the towel until I thought about putting a small window a/c in the single window connected to the unit. This gave us with the little bit of cool air every one of us needed to stay comfortable while playing music together. And the window a/c only increased the electricity bill by a moderately small amount.