Ethnography Week 4

During this weeks studies I mainly just studied my friend's band interaction at practicing and also how they interacted when they were not working. The biggest event that happened this week was the fact that the entire band was finally practicing together after a month of the leader being in New York recording and producing new material. Many of them were quite antsy to get started as one of the members took off from school in order to pursue this career and one of them is just out of school ready to get started. The guitarist of the group was recently hired while the leader was in New York and has been quite busy over the last month. Therefore, no one in the band had played with him yet and this past practice was the first time to be done. The guitarist has his own studio at his house so the band met there in order to practice. However, within a short time it was very clear that the guitarist was in fact not very good and could not do simple things. When the leader would tell him simple chord changes or timing patterns, he did not understand at all. Unfortunately, this is just unacceptable in terms of a guitarist. Chord changes should be universally one of the first things that a musician learns and therefore he was dropped immediately. Apparently when the leader interviewed him, playing was not ever done, but the guitarist talked about how he had played on several albums and also produced them. He might be able to learn a song eventually, but not having these skills makes playing something live and changing it up nearly impossible. However, this was good because everyone saw immediately that he could not do the job and was therefore cut, and guitarists are relatively plentiful.