Just got back from a pretty shitty band rehearsal. Feeling shitty, also pretty tired since I worked all day then went to rehearsal, as did everyone else. That's probably one of the factors; us all being tired.
Once we'd decided to rehearse every other week back in March or whenever it was, John had sent out a rehearsal schedule with dates, every other Saturday through September, which is when we have a gig. This past Saturday would have been a rehearsal day, but since it was the 4th of July, he asked if people would be able to get together Monday night (tonight) instead. We've done it a few times before, but it always sucks. I guess it's better than not rehearsing at all, but we're all tired, especially from the holiday weekend. We should've just rehearsed Saturday morning as usual. I didn't have anything planned until later in the day anyway.
Despite John sending out the song list for tonight's rehearsal nearly two weeks ago, and me making sure everyone had copies of the mp3s later that day (I'm the official curator of tunes in the band), we still got there tonight and our other guitarist has been "too busy" to learn the new songs. Like, apparently at no time in the past two weeks did he even listen to the songs. I honestly don't even understand that. I put the songs on my iPod and listen to them every day, because these aren't always songs that I know, and even if they are, I've never listened to them with an ear toward learning to play them before. Driving to and from work every day, sitting here on the PC, I listen to the songs over and over, sing my keyboard parts out loud in the car, drill them into my head. I don't necessarily expect everyone to do that, but how can anyone, especially these days, claim that they haven't had time in two weeks to listen to the songs?
Our drummer and singer ignored the mp3s I'd sent out and just went on YouTube and found a different version of one of the songs, didn't even bother to check and see if it was the same one, and they learned that version. It's the live version, and is very different. Different intro, different breaks, different ending. Great, so we wasted a bunch more time trying to figure what the hell was going on, and finally decided we'd learn the live version, so our singer is going to email it out to everyone. This is after I'd spent two weeks learning the studio version.
And to top everything off, we're dropping two songs which would have featured the keyboards: "Smokin'" by Boston and "Separate Ways" by Journey. The keys sounded fucking fantastic, if I do say so myself (which I don't, but literally everyone else did). I worked hard on those tunes. But our singer can't sing them; they're just too damned high. It's no one's fault, so I'm not actually mad about it, but I'll admit to being pretty damned disappointed. Not many people, male or female, can sing like Brad Delp or Steve Perry, but I'd hoped that she could. After a couple of times through, it was pretty obvious that it wasn't gonna work. Shit. So we had to drop them.