INTRO SESSION SHENANIGANS

The studio guitarist’s guide to happiness and personal fulfilment, as related by our resident session ace. This month: Playing Out From The Backline.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fun thing to run a wee band and to perform a few times each year in the heart of London’s particularly fashionable but vehicularly inaccessible West End.

To that end, for 10 years I’ve been purveying my particular brand of jazz-melodic-groovebased-fusion-crazy-sounds for the audience to dig. Yet I still find myself driving home with the familiar sense of frustration that my personal performance level sits at a deflating 85-90% of where I’d really like it to be.

But before I succumb to an exercise in ritual self-abasement (something in which we guitarists are often known to indulge), I suggest that it’s not hard to understand why this is a constantly recurring personal theme in the small-but-imperfectly-formed world of Mitch Dalton & The Studio Kings. In the weeks that precede any gig, there’s a slow but relentless increase in time expended and pressure mounted.