This spring and early summer, I did some session work at Wade Paul’s Guerilla Studios for My Brother Nature, a band featuring original compositions by Scott Fish and Clayton Jagodzinski. Last week, Scott Fish contacted me about performing two songs from the My Brother Nature CD for two television appearances on Labor Day. This was a challenge to pull off, given the short timeframe and various schedules of the personnel. For instance, I had gigs scheduled for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, in addition to guitar lessons on each day (and a wedding to attend on Sunday!). To prepare, I started by reviewing the tracks on CD, and put together some detailed lead sheets. Although it is ideal to have parts memorized for a performance, I do run into short-notice situations where lead sheets are a life-saver. Also, it may be months before I perform these tunes again. In that case, I’ll already have these sheets in my Ipad, which will shorten the time to refresh my memory.

Fortunately, I was able to schedule a short rehearsal with Fish and Clayton on Saturday morning to work out our parts. Other than that one rehearsal, we were able to run the tunes a few times with the full band after loading in at the studio. We did two performances, one for WTOL and one for the local Fox affiliate. A video of the WTOL segment is below:

My view of the WTOL/FOX studio:

For these performances, I used my Fender Blues Junior and Reverend Reeves Gabrels axe. On the pedalboard, I used a Boss mini volume pedal, Vox Ice-9 and MXR Carbon Copy.

My Brother Nature with WTOL’s Ali Bradley. Personnel from left to right, Scott Fish (lead vocals & keyboards), Art Bishop (saxophone), Clayton Jagodzinski (acoustic guitar), myself, and Wade Paul (percussion):