enframed wrote: Mon Jun 30, 2025 1:48 pm

Krev wrote: Mon Jun 30, 2025 9:21 am Is playing a guitar still considered cool in high school? I have no idea in the age of Tik Tok.

IIRC, and I learned this here, if you're a teenage Korean girl playing speed-metal, it's really cool.

I can play speed metal but I'm a middle-aged male. Too bad.

I can't play speed metal, but i'm also a middle aged man

I feel like i typed this out before, but humor me.

The first band I was in was called the Tremors. 1983-84 i think.

The drummer was one of my best friends throughout H.S. A musical polymath/prodigy who could play anything, on the Copeland/Bruford axis as a drummer. Just...advanced. He was easily bored by basically any music, and undoubtedly not captivated by ours, but for some reason he was entertained enough to be in this group.

The guitarist played exclusively barre chords and liked the Jam and the Clash, sort of an aspirant to English glam-punk. And IIRC Black Flag but that might have just been a t-shirt thing.

I played bass and was OKish, too busy of a player though. I liked the English Beat and Psychedelic Furs, maybe REM by this point.

We had a handful of originals that reflected all that musical dissonance, though "dissonance" makes it sound much cooler than it was.
We were not the worst band in Missoula, and we were legit kids, but it wasn't the greatest mix of stuff.
I learned later that narrow focus can be a great asset.
I can't remember what covers we did other than Brown Sugar, with the guitar in standard tuning and the bass just going deedle-deedle on the high G string (since I had to sing it, at 13yrs old).

After the Tremors broke up, acrimoniously, Ben (drummer) and I kept playing together and made a little tape under the name the Aboriginals.
I was relieved to find out just now that other non-indigenous-people's bands have used that name.
The music was reasonably competent and again "could've been worse" but was "not great."
We tracked it on a tascam 4tk in my trumpet teacher's basement.
I remember him tracking a guitar part in about as long as it took to play it and ten seconds in stopping and saying "eh, wrong voicing." I was like what the fuck is a voicing?
Joel Phelps played sax on one of the songs. For us, it was like having Sly Stone sit in or something.
He had headphones on when he tracked his part, so all we could hear was him. It sounded like utter insanity.
On playback, perfect, made the dumb song like four times as good.

The next band (not that anyone asked) was called Children of Habit.
Andy Cohen was just learning guitar, and it was the same rhythm section of me and my pal Ben, so it was fairly competent but also we were just goofin' around.
We played Sunshine of Your Love. Never got out of the basement. That's all I remember.

Then I was in Ein Heit with Joel, Ben, and Andy.
A great band outside of my embryonic and objectively "not great" tunes, which were in retrospect the price of having me around to play bass (pretty well by this point).

Two years later, Silkworm was founded, in 1987. QED.

Ah, first bad bands.

Unnamed project: I played a samick super strat into a matching samick practice amp. I miss the amp. 2 guitars, bass, dummer. The other guitar player huffed paint. The bass player tuned his 5 string up to standard, and you could fit your hand between the neck and strings it was so bowed. The drummer really loved Creed and POD. Knew we'd make it big if he could just witness the Power of Christ harder than the other guitarists need for a snoot full of Krylon.

Deux- a play on Dos. Me on guitar, buddy on bass. We played a buncha covers in a coffee shop. My girlfriend broke up with me that night.

Black Santa (eesh) same bass buddy. We heard Sunn and decided to make drone metal. Played a bunch of shows with hardcore party bands, who put us on the bill strictly as "at least we're not as bad and weird as whatever the fuck those two are doing" I had moved to a Telecaster at this point and was getting heavily into Dylan Carlson.

Horrible Noise - a sort of Einsturzende thing, the rule was you could only play with what you could carry. Trashcan percussion, an active bass into a practice amp, silly masks. We made roughly 100 tapes and I still have them all. I'd put some of it up, but even for 17 we were all pretty horrible little mean fuckers. The banter between and during songs is embarrassing.

Some things here and there, nothing until I sobered up at thirty. Played in a band called Spirit of Revolt, oi songs about working and beating up cops. Broke up because nobody wanted to practice besides me.

Now I'm in Ladder Match, founded when I was 34 ish. I've never been more happy than I am today, and this band is a big part of why. 2 guys who love wrestling and Harvey Milk.

My first band was thrash band called Incriminator.

Name inspired by the song "Incriminated" by Destruction. I think the guitar player just thought the name sounded cool.


I guess we got going when I was in 8th grade, then fizzled out after high school, so 1988-1993? I taught myself to play drums by learning Metallica, Slayer, etc. Pretty much entirely self-taught, hence my weird approaches and crappy technique I still haven't completely shaken off.

We were in the King Diamond / Slayer / Testament school of each song having at least 8 riffs per song. As players, I guess we were decent for our age. The songs... sounded like the bands we liked. We released one EP, and recorded a second EP that never saw the light of day. Played a handful of shows in the Southern Indiana / Louisville, KY area, but were never popular beyond our friends and classmates.

It's funny, we had some sleeper gear that we didn't appreciate at the time. I had a set of 3-ply Ludwigs that I thought were square as fuck because they were blue sparkle, so I got some gray monster Tamas with double kicks as soon as I could. Nice drums, but in retrospect they never sounded as good as the Ludwigs. Similarly, our guitar players both had Traynor amps (I can't remember what kind), that they used as power amps. They put Peavey and (no, I'm not kidding) Gorilla combo amps in front of for "tone".

I posted this once on the old forum, but an older guy we knew was in a film class in college, and made a video for one of the songs from our first record, and it is -- to put it politely -- very much of its time. I guess I was 15 or 16? Yes, you can laugh.

^^^^^That's totally solid. People have sent me stuff to master that doesn't sound as good as that.

My first band was in high school, we were called Nemesis, Here's an awesome boombox recording of the first complete take of the first song I ever wrote:



Music by me, lyrics by the singer. Early 1986. We didn't have a bass player yet and the other guitar player hadn't learned the song yet so he just comes in for the solo. I'm playing a Kramer Focus through an HM-2 into a Kustom PA head/cabinet and boy does it sound like it, but just wait for the flanger, it does not disappoint. If you stick with it till the very end there's some charming teenage enthusiasm.

And here's the flyer for our first show:



I only remember us doing like 3 shows and the last one was in the gym at my high school. During soundcheck I played the tapping part of Eruption and with the big gym reverb it sounded just like the record (to my teenage ears). That was pretty much my peak high school moment.

offal wrote: Tue Jul 01, 2025 8:52 am My first band was thrash band called Incriminator.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: ^^^^^That's totally solid.

Yeah man, that's like, a real band!* My early bands made a handful of godawful 4 track recordings where I plugged the guitar in directly. I threw away any evidence of the stuff probably by the age 18 or 19.

I don't think I was part of anything I would call 'proud of' until maybe 25.

EDIT: I thought the Destruction clip was your band. Was like wtf, this is really professional. The high school clip is good though, certainly better than any of the bands at my school.

My first band, sophomore year of college, was called H is for Harlot. Two of the coolest, most creative humans I've ever known (Nancy and Melissa) asked me to be their drummer, and boy howdy did that whole experience teach me a lot about punk rock and how it all worked. And about how fucking gross dudes can be, too.

Forever and always honored and grateful they chose me to drum with them. Felt like I was in a secret club or something.

offal wrote: Tue Jul 01, 2025 8:52 am

That's almost exactly my guitar tone ages 13-17, except everyone here can play 100X better than I could, or maybe even can.

This has it only subtly, but it reminded me of the teen band trope of, "Okay everybody will play this first part together. Then we'll all stop and start this slow part. Do it 8 times and then stop and the guitar will start this fast riff and then everybody comes in and plays it. Then stop..."

We used to play shows with another band who would transition *every* single part with just the guitarist playing the new riff after everyone dropped out. Oh and don't forget guitar parts that are only moving power chords and the vocals follow them exactly in melody and rhythm. Man, I did alot of that.

This has gotten far from the shocking proficiency of Incriminator, but everyone knows what I'm talking about.

^ Whoa.

My dumbass was struggling to play a two-chord Velvet Underground cover at 17, let alone 15.