I was a scratch DJ for a London-based Hip Hop band called 29 from 2005 until it kind of fell apart some time last year. It was live bass, Drums, Guitar/Keyboard, 2 MCs, and me on the cut. I had a wicked time and miss it if I'm honest. At our peak we put on a pretty good live show, even if I do say so myself. We had all sorts of technical issues musically, but the group dynamic was interesting and there was a lot of energy in the band. We had plenty of shortcomings but we built up a reasonable chunk of material, and I think we all developed as musicians and performers over the course of the band's history. I think we never really quite managed to do the group justice in terms of recordings unfortunately, but some of the memories are priceless.
Like eric (I'm still down with the
frequent flyer stuff man!, - That Abbey Downs stuff is wicked BTW Ty), I'm kind of doing my own thing now and have done for years, but would love to find the right people to work with. I work a bit with session musicians for my beats and stuff, but it's not the same as sharing and developing ideas, and then performing them together.
Otherwise I've been in a few other hip hop things, only one of which involved live instruments and could therefore be considered a band in the traditional sense ("Run DMC first said a DJ could be a band...."?). In 94-97 I had a group called Midnight Product (with my long-time friend B-boy Slamski) and for a while we worked with live bass and guitar, with programmed drums and live turntables, but the guitarist from that group has sadly died since. Probably the most successful thing I've been involved in was a hip hop thing called 360 Physicals with beatbox Killa Kela and a whole bunch of other people back in 98-99.
I'm really not a great musician at all, but I'm fascinated by fiddling around with sound and recording, and enjoy crafting tracks together and the whole learning curve.
If you do buy the guitar bionic, I doubt you'll really regret it in the long run
