Ideas for playing with my friend?

[chris hansen]

Hello,

My friend and I have jammed a couple of times and it was a lot of fun. He's a guitar player and he's talented enough that I can play something fairly steady and he can just play stuff although he tends to stuggle with some of my stuff more than others. He has kind of a blues background but was also in a rock band for a while so I'm looking for ideas for stuff to play that might work well with his background and that he can work with easily.

Thanks

[burke]

J.J. Cale has some great rthymic tunes in the Blues vein - and lots of fun!

[Charangaman]

Obviously Santana, War and a lot of the "Chicano" music of the 70's has that bluesy element rolling over the tumba's...

[hueroconguero]

ottmar liebert is a great acoustic guitarist and typically has a nice conga/clave groove backing it up. another plus to his style is there are very rarely any vocals, so you and your friend can just jam. try playing the congas with a clave or cowbell foot pedal..
huero

[chris hansen]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll look for them.

On a more basic level, like me, can you think of specific rhythms to learn? Tumbao seems to work well but after a while it's nice to add some variety.

I like the idea of clave or bell with a foot pedal. What would a setup like that look like, is there some kind of stand to hold it? What kind of clave would you use? I've only seen the sticks you hit together.

Hope my questions aren't too silly, I'm still kind of early in the learning curve.

Thanks.

[CongaTick]

chris,

Do a little thread searching here. Foot pedals and their options have been threaded here pretty well. And clave refers to both the sticks as well as a rhythm which forms the basis for latin music.

[burke]

For loosey goosey fun jammin...you can't go wrong with Martillo (and screwing around with it) if you have set of bongos ... Caballo on congas (IMHO).

Purists willbe scowling now - but I get the sense your just talking about having some fun with a pal in the living room surrounded by empties.

A favourite situation of mine that also helps remove the percussion pickle from my ass that gets up there now and then.

[chris hansen]

Purists willbe scowling now - but I get the sense your just talking about having some fun with a pal in the living room surrounded by empties.

That's exactly my intention, at least for the short term. Maybe later we'll play specific kinds of music but it's still too early to know what will happen.