Bands with 5+ members
 

It kinds of bugs me a bit.
When bands have a bunch of members and they're sound is lacking. I think if your going to have six guys in your band then you better have some heavy fucking music, or intense, or complex. I mean look at bad religion. Three guitarists and it sounds like one. Do they really need that many people.

no, skynyrd sucks.

Well, I kinda think the point of someone like Bad Religion having 3 guitarists is because .. when you produce an album, there might be 4 or 5 layers of guitar (hell, Jesu has about 10 guitar tracks on every track) and it's sometimes hard to replicate that sound live. Even if they're playing the SAME EXACT THING, live it's going to come off louder and meaner and thicker... but yeah. 3 seems ridiculous (I could be wrong, but I think they only have 3 because they didn't want to fire the replacement dude when Mr. Brett returned).

I had 18 people onstage once for a Scissor Shock performance. It was fun. It was a noise symphony!

Rhys Chatham, you yourself had 402 people on stage playing the same thing recently! Heh.

hah, yeah.

yeah, if you have 5+ members, you better be polyphonic, or you better havea wall of sound, otherwise someone on stage is redundant.

When I saw the P-Funk Allstars there were about 14 people on stage at once

i like the idea of having a revolving door lineup and a few core members like the sunburned hand of the man do or nnck. it keeps it fresh and new ideas are more easliy created. at last count 16 people where on the stage at sunburned last time i saw them. bliss it was.

Wilco!

pfunk always had tons of dudes on stage. that shit was ruling!

!!! has a bunch of people, but it lends to the dancestravaganza.

we thought about adding a 2nd bassist to our improve group. that's the ultimate level of wankery.

it depends on the context...

for example in a reggae band you could easily have ten people, and it could come across as simple, but yet it is very complicated.

five guitars (three rhythm as there are three ways to play any chord, two simplified leads, one a harmonic scale one accenting the bass line)
one bass
two or three horns
keys
drums
hand drummers
two are three vocal harmonists

all of these parts blend together much better then they do stand apart and the technical skill in reggae music is for all of these people to play together and sound as if it was all just one simple part. in less techincally profecient bands, you can hear all of the parts muddy together and it sounds half assed at best and just plain terrible and congested at its worst considering you can play the exact same song with only drum/bass/keys

DARK MEAT

Who's teaching all you these crass opinions?

Slipknot has like 24 people in their band and THEY FUCKING RAWK!!!




Just kidding. But they really do have like 17 people in that fucking band don't they?

yeah, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, but generally i agree

No Neck Blues Band !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

when i saw bad religion, they only had two guitars and both brian baker and greg hetson do solos and they have different styles of playing.

the thing was that when bret returned to bad religion, they didn't want to fire brian baker because a) he played like in 4 successful albums with them and b) he's a far better guitar player than bret.

i remember an interview with ministry where they asked al why they had like 4 guitar players in the band once in the 90's and he said "because nobody knew more than two songs, the only way to play a whole set was to have a bunch of people onstage who just knew bits". hilarious.

I don't understand it when people say that they have two drummers and then they sound like they have one. It's like they're saying that to make themselves look important and, erm, experimental.

but yeah, you better have some intrincacies to your sound if you're having a fucking team onstage.

like that band shit and shine who have about 5 drummers all playing identically

Slipknot's self-titled album was amazing was used all 9 members to amazing effect. It was some kind of orchestral noise metal or something.. go ahead and scoff, but if you hear the album, you know what I mean... however, later albums relegated the roles of the multiple percussionists to just dancing and banging on shit and screaming, but.. that self-titled album had lots of interesting polyrhythms. never understood why they needed a dj AND a sampler though... the sampler guy sure was funny.. I saw a live video and he had this HUGE box, it looked almost like a money mover machine.. it was this huge metal box that had one red button in the middle of it.. and he'd just randomly press it in the beginning of a song or something.. ridiculous.

On a related subject, when a band has 2 drummers the likelihood is theyre going to sound good.

early butthole surfers with two drummers and no kick drum. amazing shit!!!!

Same with the Melvins. When I went to see them at ATP I was just in awe, the whole thing just worked brilliantly.

i was disappointed by the melvins at atp, they were better when i saw them with one drummer

!! Really!! Good god. For me it jsut felt so powerful and BOOMING sorry if that sounds lame but it's true. Plus seeing Buzz rocking back and forth with his hair following looked cook as pie.