While looking for Harbinger bandmates last spring, I came across an ad calling for female musicians to help run a rock camp for girls. I couldn’t resist having had my first guitar teaching experiences in the last year. Plus, after helping my mom with her daycare from a young age, being around kids was easy for me, even fun!
I always thought the world could use more female rockers. Growing up, my only female rocker idol was a cartoon. Hole was probably my first brush with a true rock chick, albeit not the best role model. I had never even heard of The Runaways, Girlschool or even Vixen until a few years ago. All of my rock idols were men: Metallica, Alice in Chains, Black Sabbath, Oasis, NIN, Led Zeppelin to name a few. Needless to say, the decision to participate didn’t take long.
In high school, I was only one of a handful of girls in the ENTIRE school who played guitar. When it came to playing guitar, it was always me and boys, just like the rest of my life. We all started together and none of us were good when starting with the exception of a couple of people. I have fond memories of playing an E-F-G-F-E progression and yelling different Spanish words at the end. We wrote like 40 songs in one class once! (Taco!, Burrito!, Cerveza!, Arriba! etc.)
At our house parties, it was me with even more boys who joined on drums and bass. I rarely played at the house parties, preferring to play along quietly, unplugged while the boys were turned to 11. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t that they didn’t want me to play. I was always treated like one of the boys too. I just lacked the confidence and had an abnormal fear of making a mistake. It wasn’t till after high school that I heard my friend KT had an all-female cover band. I started doing open mics with her. The performance bug bit and the rest is history.
“We ‘re rockin’ summer and we ‘re friends forever!”…
That lyric sums up the week at Girls Rock Camp Mississauga (GRCM). The song is still stuck in my head! Written by newly formed all-girl group The Scatterbrains, it was performed for the first time last Friday. Oh and by new, I mean they just met four days before the Friday performance.
Video: GRCM Showcase featuring The Scatterbrains
Where do I begin!? GRCM was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done as a musician. Yeah, even better than opening up for Motley Crüe! I mean, a Crüe gig fulfills one’s ego. A Girls Rock Camp Instructor gig fills your heart and soul. Giving is one of the most human things we can do in this life.
As I mentioned in my last blog, I initially thought it was just going to be a camp where you learn or get better at an instrument like the one I went to back in 2002. I wasn’t expecting the pride and the tears. I witnessed these young tweens and teens blossom and gain confidence everyday. What they didn’t realize was that everything they accomplished at their showcase Friday night was inside of them all along.
On the first day, I asked my guitar students what they wanted to learn and almost all of them said they wanted to learn how to play solos. It made me smile because:
1) I LOVE playing solos,
2) you can’t buy curtains for your house before you build the house.
I handed out folders with chord charts, tab paper, instructions on how to string a guitar and guitar exercises. We worked on rhythm, different chord progressions, learning to read tab and chord charts, 12-bar blues, palm muting and dynamics before I gave in and showed them a minor pentatonic scale. Even then, I only let them use two notes of the whole scale. Then we added notes gradually. Oh yeah, and all this to a metronome! Read more... (1378 words, 7 images, estimated 5:31 mins reading time)