[Harp-L] Train wreck recovery

["Jim Konish" <jim.konish@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everybody,

This is really not so much a harp question as it is a band question.  Last
night my band was hosting the local blues jam, and during our opening set we
played Whammer Jammer.  It went great until the last drum fill before the
final verse, when the drummer didn't end his fill quickly enough.  This
threw me off a little, but I tried to just keep going as if it didn't
happen.  The rest of the band basically dropped out and then quickly tried
to jump back in before I was fully synchronized with the drummer, but they
were starting their progression from the end of the fill instead of just
keeping it where it should have been, so I had to insert an extra
half-measure or so before we really got it back together.  The audience
still went wild (they LOVE that song), but they had to have known that we
screwed it up at the end.  So my question is, what are some strategies that
you would use for recovering from a train wreck like that?  It seems like
this is a useful thing for a band to practice because generally everybody
knows how to recover from their own mistakes; you learn to take your own
mistakes during a solo and just turn them into something new so the audience
never knew you didn't plan it that way in the first place.  But when one
person's mistake throws the rest of the band off, it's a lot harder to hide.

Harp Content:
I just got the tools and hardware from McMaster-Carr to convert all my
Marine Bands to screws, and my initial test run on a harp with a broken reed
turned out well.  The only reed that doesn't work on it now is the one that
was broken before the mod :-)

Jim Konish
Harp, Trumpet
Deep Blue Shag
www.deepblueshag.com