Fun Music Evening

Last night, I hosted a party for the classical guitar ensemble of which I'm a member. We take a break every May, and then kickoff rehearsals in June for the coming year. At any rate, I just figured it would be fun to get everyone together outside of our normal classical environment. The only rule was that no classical music was to be played. Everyone was encouraged to bring their favorite non-classical guitar(s) for an "impure" musical outing. We had a good turnout, and several people brought their electric guitars and amps, to supplement the various musical toys that I had here already.

After chowing down on chicken fajitas and having a few beers and/or margaritas, we got down to musical business. We started off with "Blues in E," a standard offering, and then fitfully worked through some metal riffology. Eventually, I put down the bass, and picked up my steel-string guitar, and started playing bandleader. That's when it started getting really fun. I've actually learned a good number of songs, lyrics and all, and I took the band through a bunch of those, plus some others that started coming up from the other folks. By the end of the evening, we had sung and plowed through everything from the Ramones to the Beatles to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Springsteen to the Monkees to the Troggs to Prince, and even stuff in between. My voice is pretty shot this morning, but it was for a good cause. The evening was a big success, and hopefully, we'll do it again. A couple of the guys (and one of the gals) really were into the spirit of the evening, and it would be fun to get together semi-regularly for jamming. There's nothing quite like making music with friends, especially when they can pick stuff up as quickly as these folks can!